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Willi a m Wa rren 



REMINISCENCES OF 

A DRAMATIC 

CRITIC 

WITH AN ESSAY ON THE ART 
OF HENRY IRVING 

BY 

HENRY AUSTIN CLAPP 

"Forsan et hac olint meminisse j'uvabit." 




.-. :/■ 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

0)t ftftier?fte |3re&, Cambridge 

1902 



COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY HENRY AUSTIN CLAPP 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published May, 1Q02 



?N SL2 SI 
.CSS 



T"HE t iBBARV OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Comes Received 

WAY. 12 1902 


Copyright entry 

CLASS t^XXc. No. 

COPY 8. 



\ 



To F. C. C. 



NOTE 

The reader is informed of what he may 
discover for himself, — that these reminis- 
cences are not exhaustive in any sense of 
the adjective, and do not profess to present 
the history of the theatre in the United 
States during the last quarter of the Nine- 
teenth Century. Nearly all the artists 
commented on are dead; but not all the 
famous actors deceased within the writer's 
time are mentioned, even by name. The 
author has chronicled merely those recol- 
lections which, for any reason or no rea- 
son, have remained most vivid in his 
memory. 

H. A. C. 



1 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION .... I 

II. SPECTACLE, FARCE, MELODRAMA, AND 

MINSTRELSY FIFTY YEARS AGO . . *J 

III. THE WORTH AND IMPOTENCE OF FREE 

CRITICISM 21 

IV. SOME EARLY EXPERIENCES AND MIS- 

TAKES 27 

V. SELWYN'S THEATRE AND THE ROBERT- 
SON PERIOD 33 

VI. THE EPHEMERAL DRAMA AND THE EN- 
DURING DRAMA 41 

VII. THE GREAT DRAMATIC QUINQUENNIUM 

AND THE BOSTON MUSEUM ... 47 

VIII. WILLIAM WARREN, COMEDIAN . . . 53 
IX. ACTUAL AND IDEAL TRAINING FOR THE 

STAGE 68 

X. J. L. TOOLE AND CHARLES JAMES MA- 
THEWS 76 

XI. CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN 82 

XII. E. A. SOTHERN, SR 93 

XIII. THE ISOLATION OF ACTORS . . . . 106 

XIV. CHARLES FECHTER II3 

XV. EDWIN BOOTH I3I 

XVI. TOMMASO SALVINI . . . . . . . 1 42 



[ vii ] 



CONTENTS 



XVII. ADELAIDE NEILSON 1 59 

XVIII. MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES OF SINGLE 

PLAYS AND ARTISTS 1 73 

XIX. AN AMERICAN THEATRE PRIVATELY EN- 
DOWED 185 

XX. HENRY IRVING 194 

INDEX 237 



C viii ] 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 



William warren .... Frontispiece 

CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN * 82 

EDWIN BOOTH I32 

TOMMASO SALVINI 1 42 

ADELAIDE NEILSON l6o 

HENRY IRVING 194 



I: 



REMINISCENCES OF 
A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



By Way of Introduction 

THE critic who presumes to write 
his reminiscences, and therefore to 
invite the implication that he be- 
longs to the past rather than to the present, 
may find many a coigne o' vantage in his 
position when he comes to hold it with 
pen and ink against the public. He is not 
required to practice much self-restraint : 
garrulity is expected, if not desired, of 
him, as " part of his defect ; " nobody will 
disrelish his memoirs if their occasional 
flavor is a pleasant sour ; and in dealing 
with dramatic artists — at least with those 
who are dead or otherwise gone — he will 
be allowed free play for the knife of his 
criticism. Moreover, he is in a situation 

[ * ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 

of rare and novel privilege in respect of 
his pronouns ; no need here to periphrase 
with neuters and passives, or to masquerade 
in the mock ermine of the editorial " we," 
since there is no reason why every one of 
his pages should not be as full of /'s be- 
fore and behind as any Apocalyptic Beast 
I must forewarn my readers, however, 
that I can furnish them with few of those 
intimate details concerning actors, au- 
thors, and managers, which are relished 
semper, ubique, et ab omnibus, even the 
cultivated and fastidious. My narrative 
will be reduced in value by reason of this 
deficiency. After gossip has been allowed 
to stand for a few years, it usually rids it- 
self of its pernicious bacteria, and becomes 
a wholesome as well as sprightly bever- 
age. The qualities of Master Samuel Pepys 
which made him a dangerous neighbor in 
1670 make him a valuable historian in 
1 90 1. But it has seemed best to me, 
partly because actors are a very sensitive 

c » ] 



' 



' 



INTRODUCTION 



and fascinating folk, to deny myself the 
pleasure of their intimate acquaintance, 
as a rule, in the hope that my head m'ght 
neither be quite turned nor much deflected 
from a true level. Many of my confreres 
have pursued a contrary policy with im- 
pressive success, I am aware ; and I con- 
cede that, as a critic, I have sometimes 
lost, as well as sometimes gained, through 
my lack of personal contact with dramatic 
artists. My readers must enjoy my remi- 
niscences, if they enjoy them at all, as a 
series of reconsiderations of the plays and 
players of the past, from the point of view 
of a disinterested citizen or public censor. 
There ought to be some pleasure, and some 
profit, also, for all of us in such a review, 
since it may be made calmly, through an 
atmosphere cleared by reflection, from a 
distance which permits the observer to see 
things in perspective, and to judge truly of 
their relative sizes and proportions. 

It was about thirty years ago that I took 



[ 3 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



the place of critic of the drama for the 
Boston Daily Advertiser. My first ser- 
vice was rendered when that newspaper 
had for its editors two remarkable men, 
to whom I can pay at this moment hardly 
any other tribute than to mention them 
by name. The assistant, George Bryant 
Woods, the most precociously brilliant 
person I ever knew, died in 187 1, in his 
twenty-seventh year ; having won distinc- 
tion as a critic of literature and the theatre, 
as a special correspondent, as a raconteur 
of short stories, and as a writer of leaders 
upon nearly all current topics. The editor 
in chief, Charles Franklin Dunbar, who 
passed away only a few months ago, senior 
professor of political economy at Harvard, 
and ripe in years and honors, was a man 
of great wisdom, force, and acumen, and 
the master of a style which, for point, 
power, and purity, has been surpassed by 
that of scarcely any American journalist 
of our day. 

[ 4 ] 



1 



INTRODUCTION 

My equipment for my task may be indi- 
cated in a very brief paragraph. From a 
child I had been interested in the theatre 
and a reader of dramatic literature. I had 
been a student of Shakespeare for many 
years, having received my first impetus 
toward the great poet from the accom- 
plished Mr. now Dr. William J. Rolfe, 
when he was head master and I a pupil of 
the Dorchester High School. I had seen a 
good deal of acting, and had tried my 'pren- 
tice hand at commenting upon it under 
my superiors on the paper. I brought to 
my work an unaffected eagerness and in- 
tensity of interest, which have not flagged 
to this day. I may add that I had an exalted 
idea of the importance of my office, and of 
the awfulness of my responsibility to the 
theatre, to the theatrical profession, to Art 
spelled with a very large initial A, to the 
readers of the Advertiser in particular, and 
to the entire Community in general. There 
is something comical in this statement, and 

[ 5 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



perhaps it is, therefore, well that I should 
tack on to its retrospective magniloquence 
the assertion — obviously superfluous and, 
in the absence of challenge, a bit suspicious 
— that I meant to be fair and just, to the 
extent of my ability. 



[ 6 ] 



I 



II 

Spectacle, Farce, Melodrama, and 
Minstrelsy Fifty Years Ago 

APART of my stock in trade, of 
course, was my theatrical experi- 
ence, which dated from my seeing 
the Viennese children at the Boston Mu- 
seum when I was eight years of age. Then 
followed, at great yawning, heart-straining 
intervals of time, the fairy plays which 
were "features" at that theatre for a se- 
ries of years. I recall my ecstasy in wit- 
nessing these dramas, in order that my 
contemporaries may reglow and rethrill 
with me over the reminiscence. It is of no 
use to tell me, to tell any of us, that chil- 
dren enjoy themselves as much at the the- 
atrical shows of to-day as we enjoyed our- 
selves at the plays of circa 1850. And I 

[ 7 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



hold to my opinion, not only or chiefly be- 
cause modern children are as biases and 
skeptical as everybody else knows and they 
themselves frankly concede them to be, 
but because there is almost no provision 
made for them in modern American thea- 
tres. For aught I know, the Christmas 
pantomime still lingers in Great Britain. 
But to-day, in this land, — is it not curi- 
ous ? — adults are so greedy of the theatre 
that they have practically crowded children 
out of places of theatrical amusement. 
There are no Arabian Nights entertain- 
ments or " fairy plays " provided now as 
incidents of the theatric year, aimed di- 
rectly at the eyes and hearts of ingenuous 
childhood. Our children participate in for^ 
mulated aesthetic shows occasionally, clad 
in correct costumes, doing appropriate 
dances ; and some of them, when they 
have attained their teens, are taken to see 
innocuous comedies, revived at the Cas- 
tle Square Theatre from long desuetude. 

[ 8 ] 



THE STAGE FIFTY YEARS AGO 

But what do any of them know of the 
wild joys which thrilled our little breasts 
when The Enchanted Horse, The En- 
chanted Beauty, The Forty Thieves, The 
Children of Cyprus, and Aladdin possessed 
the fairyland of the stage ? I recall per- 
fectly, and can now analyze, the mixed 
conditions of my spirit at those entertain- 
ments. All was real and true, just because 
it was far away and romantic. The " cloud- 
cuckoo-land" of the imagination was the 
native heath of the healthy child of that 
day. And well I remember how tame, 
unimportant, and unnatural the characters 
appeared to me in The Drunkard, — to 
which I was taken for ethical reasons, no 
doubt, when it was produced at the Mu- 
seum, — in contrast with the glorious, vital, 
and convincing figures of AH Baba, Cogia 
Houssam, and Morgiana, of Cherry and 
Fair Star, so done into English from the 
French Cheri and Belle Etoile. It was in 
The Children of Cyprus that I first saw 

C 9 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



and heard Adelaide Phillipps, a young girl 
and a novice, but wonderfully easy and 
melodious in the garnish of the boy hero, 
Cherry ; and in The Forty Thieves I had 
my first view of William Warren, who 
impersonated Mustapha, the cheerful cob- 
bler, whose delicate professional job it was 
to sew together the severed sections of a 
human trunk. 

Only a little later Uncle Tom's Cabin 
was dramatized, and took possession of 
the stage in the Northern States. The 
theatre, which never recognizes or sees 
any public movement that is not on the 
surface of the life of the community, had 
not dreamed of the great anti-slavery sen- 
timent which had been growing like the 
substance of an avalanche for twenty years. 
The only slaves known to the stage had 
been the sprightly young darky, nimble in 
jig and breakdown, and the ragged, obese 
old grayhead, exuberant of and as to ham 
and 'possum fat ; and both these colored 

[ 10 ] 



THE STAGE FIFTY YEARS AGO 

men had celebrated, in songs and dances 
set to the foot-tilting banjo, their perfect 
happiness on " de ole plantation." And 
then, as in a moment, like lightning from 
a supposedly clear sky, Uncle Tom's Cabin 
descended upon the boards, and they in- 
stantly and eloquently echoed the woes 
and wrongs of the oppressed. I strongly 
suspect that the play was quite unworthy 
of the novel ; but the humor, fire, and pas- 
sion of the story swept everything before 
them. Mr. Warren appeared at the Mu- 
seum performance of the drama in a char- 
acter, interpolated chiefly for purposes of 
farcical mirth, entitled Penetrate Partyside, 
— a cool, shrewd Yankee, with advanced 
political opinions concerning " the peculiar 
institution," — and this part was played by 
the comedian two hundred and forty-eight 
times ; leading, in frequency of perform- 
ance, all the other characters in his vast 
repertory, even to the hour of his retire- 
ment from the stage. Mr. Frank Whit- 

C » ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



man, an actor with a natural touch and a 
gift in pathos, was Uncle Tom when I saw 
the play ; Miss Gaszynski, who had been 
doing pas seuls and other dances between 
pieces, and had been promoted to be Topsy, 
made a remarkable hit, and was said to 
have won a desirable husband by the ec- 
centric drollery of her impersonation ; and 
Mrs. Vincent, then a slim and swift young 
woman, was a flaming and, by the familiar 
law of nerve calorics, blood-chilling Cassy. 
It is worth noting that the playwright did 
not then dare to risk the popularity of his 
work by repeating the final tragedy of the 
novel, and that the drama closed with the 
rescue of Uncle Tom by George Shelby 
from the murderous hands of Legree. 
Through all the curious fluctuations in 
public taste during fifty years, the play 
keeps the stage to this day, having suf- 
fered shameful misuse in some quarters, 
and depending upon packs of real blood- 
hounds, and upon " star combinations " 

[ m ] 



THE STAGE FIFTY YEARS AGO 

with two Evas, two Topsies, two Uncle 
Toms, and the like. 

C At the time of which I am writing farces 
were greatly in vogue, and, indeed, were 
favorite side dishes upon theatrical bills 
of fare during the entire half century which 
ended with 1880. They had a definite 
place in the dramatic literature of the pe- 
riod, and may be said to have constituted 
an order or variety of that literature. Some 
of them, such as Lend Me Five Shillings, 
which Mr. Jefferson yet plays, To Paris 
and Back for Five Pounds, and A Phe- 
nomenon in a Smock Frock, were obvi- 
ous and confessed translations from the 
French ; and scores of others were stolen 
from Parisian playwrights, the marvelously 
fertile Augustin Eugene Scribe being the 
prime source of supply. But the English 
adaptations were of remarkable freedom 
and force, and often took on a flavor of 
their own which gave them almost the 
quality and value of original works. Box 

C 13 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



and Cox, and Poor Pillicoddy, are good 
examples in this kind. 

I find it hard to account for the almost 
complete extinction of this sort of play ; 
or rather, for its relegation to the " amateur 
stage." The faults of the farces are and 
were obvious. They treated life with a cer- 
tain bluntness and abruptness, and some- 
times were coarse in a frank, quasi-Eliza- 
bethan fashion. But the best of them 
not only effervesced, overflowed, crackled, 
and scintillated with humor and wit, but 
also displayed common human faults and 
failings, sometimes the usual contretemps 
of existence, with delightful vividness and 
shrewdness. In some the fun began with 
the first word, and did not fail till the 
curtain fell. They were invariably good- 
natured. The most striking of them pro- 
ceeded upon a perfectly formulated theory 
of presenting familiar weaknesses in the 
mode of true caricature ) that is to say, by 
comical exaggeration, always on the lines 

[ 14 ] 



THE STAGE FIFTY YEARS AGO 

of the truth of life. As long as they were 
played they provoked an immense amount 
of wholesome and happy laughter. The 
most serious actors — even the leaders of 
the Booth family — did not disdain to ap,- 
pear in them, and the greatest comedians 
of the nineteenth century — Blake, Burton, 
Clarke, Owens, Gilbert, Warren, and the 
Mathewses — were largely known to fame 
through the impersonation of the best far- 
cical characters. At William Warren's 
famous "benefits," — of which there were 
four per annum for many years in the 
Boston Museum, — a programme which 
had not at least one farce was seldom pre- 
sented ; and I recall some of that come- 
dian's " benefit " nights in which the bill 
consisted merely of five farces. 

The king of the English writers or 
adapters of these dramas was John Mad- 
ison Morton, and somewhat below him 
were J. B. Buckstone and T. J. Wil- 
liams. Morton's Box and Cox, Betsy 

[ i5 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



Baker, Poor Pillicoddy, and A Regular 
Fix and Williams's Ici On Parle Fran- 
cois, deserve, I am sure, a narrow little 
niche, into which they can be squeezed 
together, in the Temple of Fame. The 
most famous passage in the first of these 
pieces is worthy of Plautus : — 

" Box. Ah, tell me, in mercy tell me : 
have you a strawberry mark on your left 
arm? 

" Cox. No. 

"Box. Then it is he, — my long-lost 
brother." 

And Jane Austen herself — she of the 
pretty taste in fools, and the unsurpassed 
gift of producing them in her novels — 
would have rejoiced to make the acquaint- 
ance of the ineffable Mrs. Toodles, who 
bought an inscribed doorplate at an auc- 
tion, because (to quote her words to her 
husband) " we may have a daughter, and 
that daughter may be a female and live 
to the age of maturity, and she may marry 

[ 16 ] 



THE STAGE FIFTY YEARS AGO 

a man of the name of Thompson, — with 
a P, — and then how handy it will be to 
have it in the house ! " 

At the time when my service as dra- 
matic critic began, the negro minstrel 
show, descended, with some crossing of 
the stock, from Christy's Minstrels of 
New York and Ordway's ^Eolian Vocal- 
ists of Boston, was in a failing condition. 
I mean, of course, the entertainment of 
that order which was fixed " in residence," 
as Shakespeare would say, and accepted 
as a constant and necessary form of pub- 
lic amusement. Morris Brothers, Pell and 
Trowbridge still had their own little the- 
atre in Province Court, and there, on every 
evening and two afternoons of the week, 
dispensed their broad, highly accentuated 
fun and heavily treacled sentiment. Both 
the fun and the sentiment seem in the 
retrospect rather rudimentary and raw; 
yet it would be absurd to deny that the 
vein of feeling which Stephen C. Foster 

[ i7 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



and the best of his sort worked was of 
genuine gold, though as thin, perhaps, as 
the petal of the cotton blossom, or that 
the negro minstrel drolleries sometimes 
had a contagious jollity and a rich unction 
which were all their own. 

This was the period, also, of the first 
prevalence of the "variety show;" the 
Howard Athenaeum, which had had an 
experience of more variety than any other 
piece of masonry in the city of Boston, 
being appropriately dedicated to the new 
programme. This "show" was the foun- 
tain head — or rather, the beginning — of 
all that kind of theatrical entertainment 
which now goes by the trebly absurd and 
grossly misdescriptive name of "vaude- 
ville." Indeed, there is neither distinction 
nor difference between the entertainments 
with the two titles. " Vaudeville " is only 
" variety " " writ large" and grown fashion- 
able. The later show has merely a bigger 



[ 18 ] 



THE STAGE FIFTY YEARS AGO 

bill of fare, chiefly through its use of the 
contrivances of modern science. To the 
vocal and instrumental solo, the dance, 
the song and dance, the stump speech or 
monologue, the one-act drama, sentimental 
or comic, the dialogue, generally in dia- 
lect, of the two funny men, feats of acro- 
bats and jugglers, and the deeds of per- 
forming dogs — all of which were of the 
old regime — are now added the wonders 
of the kinetoscope and the biograph. And 
this congeries furnishes the amusement 
which at present about equally divides 
with the regular theatre the public patron- 
age, counting its daily spectators in Bos- 
ton by double thousands. It is good to be 
able to believe that the public's morals are 
not jeoparded by the prevailing taste, and 
good to be assured that the overtaxed 
public's mind and overwrought public's 
nerves are rested and soothed by "the 
vaudeville." Also, it is to be hoped that 

[ 19 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



this use of mild sedatives in the form of 
amusement will not be so extensive and 
long continued as seriously to soften the 
gray matter of the public's brain. 



[ 20 ] 



Ill 

The Worth and Impotence of Free 
Criticism 

ASa part of an already too long intro- 
l— \ duction, it is right that I should 
say a brief but emphatic word as 
to the freedom which was accorded me 
by the managers and editors of the Ad- 
vertiser. That freedom was perfect at the 
outset, and was never limited or dimin- 
ished. The value of such liberty to a pub- 
lic critic is incalculably great; the lack of 
it to an honest and earnest man in that 
vocation is like the lack of wholesome 
air to human lungs. It was years before 
I fully appreciated my privilege in this 
kind, or realized how much happier was 
my lot than that of some of my profes- 
sional brethren. The ideally perfect dra- 

[ « ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



matic critic must always be, even in 
Paris, London, and New York, a rara 
avis. The man whose equipment includes 
a good working familiarity with the clas- 
sic and modern languages* an intimate 
acquaintance with all English literature, 
and with all that is most important in 
other literatures; a long experience with 
the theatre; a high and varied skill in 
writing; honesty of purpose and complete 
emancipation from mean personal preju- 
dice; and, finally, the faculty, inborn, and, 
though highly susceptible of cultivation, 
never to be acquired, of detecting false 
touches in acting as the perfect ear detects 
false tones in music, — even the late bril- 
liant, accomplished, and unimpeachable 
Sarcey did not fill the area of that defini- 
tion. Yet if such an Admirable Crichton 
existed, he would not be effective on the 
staff of a newspaper which in any way 
or at any point, for commercial or any 
reasons, cabined, cribbed, or confined him; 

[ 22 ] 



IMPOTENCE OF FREE CRITICISM 

hinting here, coaxing there, anon under- 
taking to give instructions as to his meting 
out of praise or blame. I have known 
many critics, and of the entire number 
have known but one whom I believed to 
be capable of corruption in his high office. 
They were, and are, as square a set of 
men as ever lived. But some of them 
were hampered and handicapped by their 
employers, and came short of rendering 
the best service to the public because of 
counting-room pressure in favor of liber- 
ally advertising theatres, or against the- 
atres whose patronage was less valuable. 
Sometimes it has happened, also, — though 
seldom anywhere, I suppose, and oftener 
in New York than Boston, — that among 
the actors there were friends or foes of 
editors in chief or of owners, with the 
shameful consequence that the critic was 
bidden to be "a respecter of persons," 
and at the same time instructed to be 

[ n ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



crafty not to betray the secret of his par- 
tiality. 

The newspapers whose criticism of the 
drama is thus sordidly biased are soon 
found out, and lose all or much of their 
influence with their readers. And having 
made this big declaration in the interest of 
reason and common sense, I must meekly 
subject it to a discount of about seventy- 
five per cent., and confess that a large 
majority of all the persons who read the 
daily journals have not the faintest notion 
of comparing or distinguishing the values 
of various censures. The great body of 
patrons of the theatre are, indeed, alike 
indifferent and, directly, impervious to 
criticism of any sort; they swarm into 
the playhouses with an indiscriminating 
eagerness of desire, which seems as mas- 
terful as the blind instinct that compels 
the migration of schools of fish; they are 
laws unto themselves, and find out and 



[ H ] 



IMPOTENCE OF FREE CRITICISM 

applaud what they like by the application 
of those laws, some of which have roots 
which run far down into our common psy- 
chic protoplasm. The judicious remain- 
der — absolutely large in numbers, though 
comparatively few — constitute the body 
to which the critic appeals, through which, 
by processes of slow filtration, he may 
hope to make some indirect impression 
for good upon the vast mass of humanity 
that fills the theatres night after night, 
week after week. If this statement seems 
cynical, the reader is requested to consider 
the situation in a kindred matter, and to 
note that three quarters of the general 
perusal of contemporary books is utterly 
uninfluenced by any kind of literary criti- 
cism. The huge public which revels in 
the novels, for example, of " Albert Ross " 
and Mrs. Mary J. Holmes knows no more 
about book notices than it knows about 
the Eddas. As far as that public is con- 

[ 25 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



cerned, the critical journals, magazines, 
and reviews might as well be printed in 
Russian as in English, as well be published 
in St. Petersburg and Moscow as in New 
York and Boston. 



C 26 ] 



IV 

Some Early Experiences and 
Mistakes 

I HAVE said a single word about the 
earnestness with which I entered upon 
my critical profession. That earnest- 
ness, honest though it was, moved me to 
pursue a course one line of which I much 
regret. It was the day of resident stock 
companies, and the critic was confronted 
weekly, during a whole season, with the 
same players. Some of these actors — 
leaders in their troupe and others — I found 
to be faulty, " retrograde " to all my artistic 
" desire," and therefore fit subjects for un- 
favorable comment. There was one vari- 
ety in particular with which I could not, 
and cannot, be patient : namely, the hard, 
dry, hyperemphatic sort, usually feminine 

[ 27 J 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



in gender, whose words come out, edged 
and clanging, as if they were disks of 
metal, cut and ejected by a machine. Dur- 
ing a considerable period, beginning with 
1870, there was an irruption upon the stage 
of players of this kind ; Miss Fanny Mo- 
rant, of New York, a highly gifted actress, 
whose personal force carried all before it, 
being, I strongly suspect, the model whom 
they caricatured. There was also a bois- 
terous-slouchy masculine mode, which I 
almost equally disrelished. But I am sin- 
cerely sorry that I found it necessary to 
pursue such, or any, of the regularly ap- 
pearing players with reiterated disapproval. 
I ought to have made clear in a general 
way my opinion of the faultiness of the 
actor's method, and occasionally, but not 
often, have briefly reapplied my foot rule 
to show his particular shortcomings in a 
new part. I look back and admire the dig- 
nified, patient silence in, which these play- 
ers, with scarcely an exception, bore a fre- 

C 28 ] 



EXPERIENCES AND MISTAKES 

quent application of the lash at the hands 
of many writers, of whom I was one. In- 
cessant fault-finding, just or unjust, is sel- 
dom good for anybody, because it either 
sets up in its victim a condition of nervous 
irritability, which defeats or impedes im- 
provement, or produces in him a calloused 
or defiant indifference. 

Early in my professional experience I 
committed a gross extravagance in lauda- 
tion. Mrs. Scott-Siddons made her first 
appearance as a reader in the Music Hall, 
when she was in her twenty-sixth year. 
Many Bostonians lost their heads on the 
occasion. I infer from a reperusal of my 
notices of her work that I was one of those 
Bostonians. Her beauty was of a very ra- 
diant, rare, and exquisite sort. It seems to 
me that I recall that her ease and aplomb 
of manner, as in her sole small person she 
took possession of the huge desert of a 
stage, and serenely occupied with her desk 
a small oasis therein, impressed me even 

[ 29 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



more than her beauty. I incline to think 
that she really did read pretty well ; in- 
deed, I am sure that she read Tennyson's 
Lady Clara Vere de Vere uncommonly 
well. But I now perceive that there was 
no reason for my speaking of her and the 
great Sarah Siddons, her great-grandmo- 
ther, in the same breath, or even in the 
same week. A little later I received a 
punishment which fitted my blunder, when 
she essayed acting, and I was obliged to 
comment on her performance. Yet that 
she could not act does not prove that she 
could not read. Many excellent readers 
have failed utterly upon the stage; per 
contra, a few fine actors have not been 
acceptable as readers. But if one could 
have heard Mrs. Scott-Siddons through 
one's eyes, they would have been " worth 
all the rest " of the senses, and her playing 
would have seemed peerless. 

Many of my readers will be surprised 
and amused to learn that every decent, 

1 3° ] 



EXPERIENCES AND MISTAKES 

outspoken critic raises up against himself 
a body of hostile unprofessional, princi- 
pally of the more excitable sex, — strong 
in numbers, too, if weak in brain, — to 
whom he is persona excessively non grata, 
simply because he has dispraised, or even 
not sufficiently praised, their favorite per- 
former. There is something deliciously 
droll, and something rather touching, in 
such partisanship, inasmuch as the allies 
are, as a rule, strangers to the actor, who 
is therefore the object of their distant and 
purely disinterested cult, and also is usually 
a player of no great reputation. There is 
not a critic of a prominent daily newspaper 
who does not occasionally note the scowl- 
ing brows and basilisk glances of strangers 
who detest him for his disparagement of 
some one, — he can seldom guess whom. 
Boston is of all large American cities the 
one in which such cherishers of sentiment 
are rife, because it is the most ebulliently 
naive of all American cities in its passion 

[ 3i ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



for the theatre. Not very long ago, I 
learned that I was in the black book of 
every member of a certain respectable 
family, because of my " attitude " toward 
a histrionic artist whom they one and all 
admired. I had seldom seen the gentleman 
play, and had commented on him but three 
times : once with definite disapproval, once 
with mild objection, once with faint praise, 
— thus thrice writing myself down a per- 
jured knave. 



[ 3* 3 



Selwyn's Theatre and the Robert- 
son Period 

IN 1870 there were only five theatres 
in Boston, and the price of the best 
reserved seats varied from seventy- 
five cents to one dollar. The advance in 
public demand for theatrical amusement 
in this city may be inferred both from the 
present number of our theatres, which is 
fifteen, and from the doubling of the charge 
for places in houses of the highest grade. 
In that year the wave of excitement caused 
by the opening of Selwyn's Theatre, after- 
wards known as the Globe, was just begin- 
ning to subside. The establishment of the 
new house had been regarded as a great 
event, and the merits of its first three 
stock companies — of which Mrs. Chan- 

[ 33 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



frau, Miss Carson, Miss Mary Cary, Mrs. 
Thomas Barry, Miss Harris, Miss Kitty 
Blanchard, Mrs. Wilkins, Miss Wells, Miss 
Fanny Morant, Mrs. E. L. Davenport, and 
Messrs. Frederic Robinson, Stuart Rob- 
son, C. H. Vandenhoff, H. S. Murdoch, 
W. J. Le Moyne, G. H. Griffiths, Harry 
Pearson, H. F. Daly, and Harry Josephs 
were, at different times, members, — were, 
it might almost be said, the chief theme 
of Boston's table-talk. The theatre's ini- 
tial experiment had been made with La 
Famille Benoiton of Sardou, played under 
the name of The Fast Family ; but the 
triumphs of its first season were won 
with three curiously contrasted dramas, 
of which two are now unknown to the 
public stage, and the third is seldom seen 
in this country. These three were, Dora, 
a very free dramatic version, proceeding 
from the pen of Charles Reade, of Tenny- 
son's brief idyl of the same name ; The 
Spirit of '76, a comedietta, by Mrs. Daniel 

[ 34 ] 



SELWYN'S THEATRE 



Sargent Curtis ; and Robertson's Ours. 
All the theatre-going population of Bos- 
ton — then about half the population of 
Boston — went wild over Dora, a purling 
piece, surface-ruffled only by Farmer Al- 
len's tyrannical self-will and honest obsti- 
nacy, which were presented with heavy- 
handed effectiveness by Mr. Robinson. It 
was Dora herself, the gentle, persuasive 
Dora, the rustic but not rude, the meek 
but not insipid, — beautiful, sweet, sound- 
hearted to the core, like some perfect fruit 
ripened in a sunny nook of an English 
garden, — it was this Dora that prevailed 
with everybody, in the person of Mrs. F. 
S. Chanfrau, whose style was as frank 
and unaffected as her face was lovely, 
her voice melodious, her manner gracious. 
Reread, the last sentence seems to me to 
be lightly touched with enthusiasm. But 
I decline to qualify or to apologize. Dora 
has passed away, and Mrs. Chanfrau has 
quitted the stage. Dora had no special 

C 35 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



right to live, I suppose, but nothing could 
make me doubt that, with the actress of 
thirty years ago to play the leading part, 
the drama would captivate sensitive hearts 
to-day ; and as to this declaration, I put 
myself upon a jury of my peers, — recog- 
nizing as my peers, for this purpose, only 
such persons as distinctly remember the 
play and its chief player. 

Mrs. Curtis's drama, The Spirit of '76, 
deserves to be recalled not only for its 
piquant wit, but because of the interest 
attaching to its prophetic character. It 
was in form a delicate burlesque, but its 
plot and dialogue were underborne by a 
thoughtful, conservative purpose. Pro- 
duced in 1868, the play was a fanciful 
picture in anticipation of our corner of 
the United States in 1876, the political and 
economic relations of the sexes having 
been precisely inverted ad interim. None 
of the more extravagant visions have any- 
where come even partly true, except in 

c 36 ] 



SELWYN'S THEATRE 



Colorado and the three other sparsely 
populated gynecratic states. Massachu- 
setts is not yet ruled by a "governess;" 
there are no women on its supreme bench, 
and none sit in its jury boxes; it has thus 
far escaped a law which makes it a felony 
for an unmarried man to decline an un- 
married woman's offer of marriage. But 
Mrs. Curtis's adumbration of some less 
violent but highly significant changes was 
remarkable. She really predicted, in the 
next sequent generation of young women, 
that union of virile athleticism and sopho- 
moric abandon which makes the manners 
of the twentieth-century girl so engaging. 
Ours, by T. W. Robertson, was pro- 
duced at Selwyn's in the spring of 1868, 
and was succeeded, in 1869, by School, 
My Lady Clara, and The Nightingale, by 
the same playwright; and within a few 
months, on either side of these two years, 
David Garrick, Society, Caste, Play, Home, 
War, and The M. P. were given at most of 

[ 37 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



the leading theatres of the country. The 
period from 1867 to 1877 might, with a 
decent show of propriety, be called the 
T. W. Robertsonian decade of the drama 
in America. In England the Robertsonian 
reign stretched out for twenty years or 
more. The Encyclopaedia Britannica de- 
clared, in 1 886, that his " popularity showed 
no sign of waning." The author's life 
was embraced between 1829 and 187 1, 
and he knew not his first taste of success 
till seven years before his death. Of the 
dramas mentioned above, only The Night- 
ingale and War met with failure. David 
Garrick, Home, and Caste were much the 
best of the series, and, of these, the first 
two had been brazenly — or perhaps, just 
frankly — plagiarized from the continent 
of Europe; Home being a loose version 
of L'Aventuriere of Emile Augier. David 
Garrick lends itself to the needs of rising 
"stars," and seems to be booked for a 
stage immortality, the span of which is 

[ 38 ] 



SELWYN'S THEATRE 



that of the life of man, to wit, threescore 
and ten years, or, if the play be very 
strong, fourscore years. That some of 
the other dramas die hard is undeniable. 
Caste leads in limpet ability to cling to 
life. School is "revived" every now and 
then for a few hours, but soon resumes its 
slumbers. Yet, with the exceptions noted, 
all these plays, as far as the public stage 
of this country is concerned, are dead or 
at their last gasp. It is curious to think 
either of their life or of their death, of 
the life and death of hundreds of their 
contemporaries and near successors. Al- 
bery? Yates? Charles Reade? Simpson? 
Tom Taylor? Henry J. Byron? What, 
what has become of all their lavish waste of 
dramatic words ? Even Still Waters Run 
Deep — whose plot Mr. Tom Taylor did 
cheerfully " convey," as " the wise it call," 
from Le Gendre of Charles de Bernard — 
is a forgotten demi-semi classic. Byron's 
Our Boys seems to have some of the salt 

[ 39 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



of youth in it; but his £100,000, Cyril's 
Success, and Our Girls, all of which were 
greatly in vogue for a considerable time 
after their production, have gone into the 
" Ewigkeit," with the lager beer of Hans 
Breitmann's " barty." Looking back at 
my notice of Cyril's Success, I see that I 
absurdly likened the wit of the comedy 
to that of The Rivals; but Byron's play 
is as dead as Scrooge's partner, while 
Sheridan's is good for another century, 
at least. 



C 40 ] 



VI 

The Ephemeral, Drama and the 
Enduring Drama 

INDEED, of all the big crowd of 
English playrights who produced dra- 
mas, always with extreme facility and 
sometimes with contemporaneous success, 
between 1845 an ^ J ^7S? — excepting, of 
course, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, — 
every man but Robertson is to-day practi- 
cally obsolete. Not a single one of their 
works has a name that will survive the first 
quarter of this century, unless it be a sur- 
vival to be embalmed and entombed in an 
encyclopaedia. By 1925 the stage that knew 
these dramas will know them no more, 
and Time will have allowed their claims 
for recognition as literature by impartially 
pitching them all into his dust heap. 

C 4i 3 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



That Robertson's comedies should be 
the last to succumb to this remorseless 
rule of death is interesting. Their texture 
is of the flimsiness of gossamer; their wit 
usually consists of quaint equivoque; their 
wisdom is trite; their humor, often de- 
licious in flavor, trickles in a thin and 
narrow stream; their passion, except for 
a few minutes in Caste, has neither depth 
nor blaze. But they showed the work of 
a deft hand in their effective situations; 
they had a grace and charm of their own, 
which made them cling to the memory as 
tenaciously as the fragrance of lavender 
clings to gloves and laces ; and they were 
often in touch with life, though the touch 
never became a grasp. Again, a special 
word is to be said for Caste, which dealt 
finely, if not profoundly, with the never 
ceasing strain between the freedom of 
man as an individual and his bondage as 
a member of society. Nearly all these 
plays, also, displayed, after a fashion pe- 

[ 4* ] 



1 



THE EPHEMERAL DRAMA 

culiar to their author, the familiar con- 
trasts between generosity and meanness, 
simplicity and sophistication, the self-for- 
getting impulsiveness of youth and the 
self-cherishing deliberation of middle age. 
Robertson loved to point such compari- 
sons by means of bits of dialogue, carried 
on at opposite sides of the stage by pairs 
of persons, neither pair being conscious 
of the other. The mode of many of these 
passages was distinctly cynical, if not un- 
amiable; but their surface truth was of 
universal appeal, and their humor was 
fetching. Indeed, the public palate always 
most keenly relished Robertson's mild 
bitterness when it was bitterest. Some of 
my readers will recall an exemplary epi- 
sode in Ours. The scene is an English 
private park. A heavy shower of rain has 
come on, and two pairs have sought shel- 
ter under the trees. On the right are a 
youthful couple, in the early stages of a 
love affair. The jeune -premier has taken 

[ 43 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



off his coat, and insists upon wrapping it 
around the slender figure of the girl against 
her pleased but earnest objections. On 
the left are a middle-aged married pair. 
The wife presently says, in a peevish tone, 
"Alexander, if you walked to the hall, 
you could send me an umbrella; " to which 
the husband promptly replies, " I ? d rather 
you 'd get wet." 

The deeper reasons of the law of the 
survival of dramas may not be laid down 
here and now, but a good negative work- 
ing-day rule of prediction can be furnished. 
It seems to be a part of the present order 
of things, at least in English-speaking coun- 
tries, that our dramas shall be ephemeral. 
Even the best of them are like insects, 
made to flaunt their little wings for a few 
hours in the sunshine of popular favor. 
The caprice of fashion deals out death 
with relentless speed to these plays. That 
they furnish the public with much enter- 
tainment is not to be questioned; but they 

[ 44 ] 



THE EPHEMERAL DRAMA 

have no essential beauty, or imposing 
breadth, or prevailing power to make their 
appeal potent beyond a year or less of life. 
" The best in this kind are but shadows," 
said the Dramatist of the World, in one 
of his remarkable expressions of doubt 
about the art of which he was Prime Min- 
ister and Master. The rule of negative 
prediction is simple enough : The play 
which never passes into literature; the 
play which, in "the cold permanency of 
print," cannot endure reading and reread- 
ing, has the sure seed of death within it. 
Out of a hundred contemporary dramas, 
ninety are flat and unprofitable on a first 
perusal, and ninety-and-nine are warranted 
to cause mental nausea at a second. Take 
Robertson's School, for instance, which 
was performed to delighted hundreds of 
thousands, in England and America, in the 
early seventies. Reading it deliberately 
to-day is like absorbing a gallon of weak, 
warmish eau sucree flavored with the juice 

[ 45 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



of half a lemon and a small pinch of gin- 
ger. Contrast with that work, and with 
works of its quality, the half a hundred 
tragedies and comedies which remain to 
us from the Greeks of the fifth and fourth 
centuries before Christ. The newest of 
these plays are two thousand two hundred 
years old : they are written in a dead lan- 
guage; they have the atmosphere of a re- 
mote land and an alien age and civilization; 
yet they still receive the quick sympathy 
and command the reverent admiration of 
the world. The corollary of the rule for 
negative prediction is obvious: The na- 
tion which is producing no readable dra- 
matic literature is producing no dramas of 
permanent importance from the points of 
view of art and life, which are indeed one 
point and the same. 



C 46 ] 



\ 



VII 

The Great Dramatic Quinquennium 
and the Boston Museum 

THE first few years of my experience 
were memorable for their wealth 
of interest, for the splendor and 
variety of their histrionic material, for the 
significant changes of the lines upon which 
the American theatre was to develop. 
Within the half decade between 1870 and 
1875, Charles Fechter, Carlotta Leclercq, 
and Tommaso Salvini first appeared in this 
country ; Charles James Mathews, in ad- 
mirable form, revisited our stage after a 
long absence ; Charlotte Cushman, having 
reestablished her primacy over all our na- 
tive actresses, was playing her most cel- 
ebrated parts ; Nilsson and Lucca and 
Parepa-Rosa were first seen and heard here 

[ 47 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



in opera ; Edwin Booth was approaching 
the zenith of his fame and power ; Jeffer- 
son's Rip Van Winkle was causing itself to 
be accepted as the highest achievement of 
American comedy ; Sothern's unique art, 
especially in Lord Dundreary, its most 
original expression, had prevailed over the 
two great English-speaking nations, but 
was still as fresh as the dew of morning ; 
Madame Janauschek's superior ability was 
beginning to be appreciated ; Adelaide 
Neilson, the incomparable, entered upon 
her American career ; W. S. Gilbert's 
peculiar gifts as a dramatist were in pro- 
cess of acceptance on this side of the 
Atlantic ; and our country, through Mr. 
Bronson Howard and his Saratoga, was 
making a new essay of originality in the 
creation of a play of contemporaneous 
" society." This was the period, also, of a 
great revival of dramatic versions of Dick- 
ens's novels, in the best of which, Little 
Em'ly, there was much good acting in Bos- 

[ 48 ] 



DRAMATIC QUINQUENNIUM 

ton : first at Selwyn's Theatre, by Mr. 
Robinson as Peggotty, Mr. Le Moyne as 
Uriah Heep, Mr. Pearson as Ham Peg- 
gotty, Mrs. Barry as Rosa Dartle, and 
Miss Mary Cary as Emily ; and later, at 
another house, when John T. Raymond 
gave his delicious interpretation of Mi- 
cawber. Also, it may be stated in paren- 
thesis, midway of these years, to wit in 
1872, occurred in Boston the Peace Jubi- 
lee, with its huge chorus and orchestra, 
its foreign bands of instrumentalists, and 
its presentation of Madame Peschka-Leut- 
ner ; the necessary machinery having been 
set in motion by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, 
most persistent and tireless of conductors 
and entrepreneurs. 

It was at "about this time" — the fa- 
miliar quotation from the Old Farmer's 
Almanac is apropos — that that breaking 
up of stock companies, which had previ- 
ously begun, took on a precipitate speed. 
There were still, however, a dozen or so 

[ 49 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 

regularly established troupes in the whole 
land, and of these this city had three of 
the best, placed at the Boston Theatre, the 
Globe, and the Boston Museum. The last 
of these houses was in a distinctive and 
peculiar sense the theatre of the capital of 
Massachusetts : partly because of its age 
and unbroken record as a place of amuse- 
ment ; even more because of the steady 
merit of its performances and the celebrity 
of many of its performers. At the outset, 
as every Bostonian knows, this establish- 
ment was conducted on the plan of Bar- 
num's of New York. The word " theatre " 
was not visible on any of its bills, pro- 
grammes, or advertisements. It was a mu- 
seum, and justified its title by an edifying 
exhibit of stuffed animals, bones, mum- 
mies, minerals, wax figures, and other cu- 
rios ; making, through these " branches of 
learning " and its long-continued obeisance 
to Puritan tradition — after that tradition 
had ceased from the Municipal Ordinances 

C 5° ] 



DRAMATIC QUINQUENNIUM 

— by closing its doors on Saturday nights, 
an eloquent appeal to the patronage of so- 
ber persons, affected with scruples against 
the godless theatre. The appeal was as 
successful as it was shrewd. To this day, 
I doubt not, there are citizens of Boston 
who patronize no other place of theatrical 
amusement than its Museum, though the 
stuffed beasts and the observance of the eve 
of the Lord's Day are things of the past. 

But, howsoever disguised or preferred 
by the children of the Puritans, the Mu- 
seum was a theatre, if ever there was one. 
Those who can recall its earliest days will 
find clinging to their memories swarms of 
names, generally well mixed up as to dates 
and sequences : Mr. Tom Comer, leader of 
the orchestra, accomplished musician and 
genial gentleman ; W. H. Smith, an old- 
time actor and manager of stately style ; 
Mrs. Thoman, a charming performer of 
light comedy ; Mr. Finn, droll son of a 
much droller father ; the graceful and 

C 5i ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



vivid Mr. Keach ; Mr. J. Davies, who was 
a very " heavy " villain on the stage, but, 
off it, lightly wielded the barber's razor ; 
the blazing Mrs. Barrett, whose life went 
out in darkness ; J. A. Smith, who did 
stage fops, always with the same affected 
drawl and rising inflection, and, an actor 
at night, was a tailor by day, except on 
Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, when 
he was an actor ; Miss Kate Reignolds, a 
very brilliant player, who, as Mrs. Erving 
Winslow, now enjoys the highest reputa- 
tion as a reader ; the dryly effective Mr. 
Hardenbergh ; Mr. Charles Barron, a care- 
ful and versatile leading man ; Miss Annie 
Clarke, who made herself an accomplished 
actress, despite the handicaps of a harsh 
voice and native stiffness of bearing ; Mrs. 
Vincent, the perennial, the great-hearted, 
who for years was never mentioned except 
in close connection with the adjectives 
"dear" and "old;" and, finally, Wil- 
liam Warren, the comedian. 

C 5* ] 



VIII 
William Warren, Comedian 

BOSTON was fortunate, indeed, to 
be the home and workshop of Wil- 
liam Warren for the better part of 
half a century. His career as an actor cov- 
ered exactly fifty years, extending from 
1832 to 1882 ; and during the entire period 
between 1847 and 1882, except for a sin- 
gle break of one year, he was the central 
sun of the stock company of the Boston 
Museum. Of the modern mode of histri- 
onic vagabondage he had no experience, 
— no experience, of course, of the mer- 
cenary " star " system, which binds the 
artist to very numerous repetitions of a 
very few plays. When his seventieth birth- 
day was celebrated, a little while before 
the close of his professional career, the tale 

[ 53 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



of his work was told : he had given 13,345 
performances, and had appeared in 577 
characters ! What a record is this, and 
how amazingly it contrasts with the expe- 
rience of other noted modern players ! It 
may be safely presumed, I think, that no 
other American actor, even in the early part 
of the nineteenth century, ever matched 
Mr. Warren's figures. But compare them 
with those of his eminent kinsman, Joseph 
Jefferson, who within the latter half of his 
life as an actor, say from 1875 to 1900, 
has probably impersonated not more than 
a dozen parts in all ; limiting himself, at 
ninety-nine out of every hundred of his 
performances, to exactly four characters. 

Something is gained, something is lost, 
of course, by the pursuit of either of the 
professional courses which have been in- 
dicated. But as I look back upon Mr. 
Warren and his playing, the lives of all 
his rivals seem narrow, monotonous, and 
unfruitful. His art touched life, as life is 

C 54 ] 



WILLIAM WARREN 



presented in the drama, at ten thousand 
points. His plays were in every mode and 
mood of the Comic Muse, and ranged in 
quality from the best of Shakespeare to 
the worst of Dr. Jones. In old-fashioned 
farces, with their strong, sometimes vul- 
gar, often noisy, usually vital fun ; in taw- 
dry patriotic or emotional melodramas ; in 
standard old English comedies ; in cheap 
local pieces, narrow and petty in their 
appeal ; in delicate French comediettas, 
whose colors are laid on with a brush like 
Meissonier's ; in English versions of the 
best Parisian dramas, subtle, sophisticated, 
exigent oi finesse and adresse in the player, 
— in each and all of these Mr. Warren 
was easily chief among many good actors ; 
to the demands of each and all he was 
amply adequate. The one fault of his style 
was a slight excess in the use of stentorian 
tones, — the result, I suspect, of his early 
immersion in farce, — and his gift of pa- 
thetic suggestion, though generally sure, 

[ 55 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



did not always have the deepest penetra- 
tive power. Otherwise, it may be said, 
with sober scruple for the exact truth, 
that Mr. Warren was nearly faultless. 
His acting seemed the fine flower of care- 
ful culture, as well as the free outcome of 
large intelligence and native genius. His 
enunciation and pronunciation of English 
were beyond criticism. His Latin was 
perfect, even in its quantities. His French 
was exquisite in intonation, and its accent 
was agreeable to Parisian ears. In all 
details of costume and " make-up " he 
showed the nicest taste and judgment, 
and the results of scholarly pains. So Mr. 
Warren was a School and Conservatory 
of acting in himself. In him Boston had 
a Theatre Francais, situated on Tremont 
Street, as long as he lived and played; 
and Boston ought to be ashamed of itself 
that it did not derive more profit from the 
inspection and enjoyment of his masterly 
art than the present time gives any proof of. 

[ 56 ] 



WILLIAM WARREN 



Apropos of the large attribution of the 
last two sentences, I wish to submit here a 
piece of Gallic testimony that I cited in the 
essay on Mr. Warren which was printed 
in The Atlantic Monthly a few years ago. 
With Rachel, on her visit to America in 
1855-56, came M. Leon Beauvallet, as 
one of the jeunes -premiers of her troupe, 
and historiographer of the expedition. On 
his return to Paris he published a thick 
duodecimo, entitled Rachel and the New 
World, which is one of the liveliest books 
ever written by a lively Frenchman. His 
strictures upon American life and man- 
ners were a queer mixture of flippancy, 
ignorance, and shrewdness. But of acting 
he was a keen and lucid critic, educated 
in the best Gallic school, familiar with 
all the best work of the Parisian stage. 
On the first Saturday afternoon of the 
company's first season in Boston, Rachel 
played Adrienne Lecouvreur at the Bos- 
ton Theatre; and M. Beauvallet, being 

C 57 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



"out of the bill," repaired, with much 
curiosity, to the Museum to see Adri- 
enne the Actress, cast with Miss Eliza 
Logan as the heroine, and Mr. Keach as 
Maurice de Saxe. He found the perform- 
ance, as a whole, anything but to his taste, 
and expressed his displeasure with un- 
sparing frankness. But of Mr. Warren 
he said : " Mr. W. Warren, who played 
the role of Michonnet, has seemed to me 
exceedingly remarkable, [Italics in the 
original.] He acted the part of the old 
stage manager with versatile talent, and I 
have applauded him with the whole 
house." And after a sweeping expression 
of disgust concerning the various anachro- 
nisms in dress, he was careful to add, " I 
do not allude to Mr. Warren, who was 
irreproachably costumed." 

My contemporaries will heartily com- 
mend my insistence upon the greatness of 
this artist and the greatness of his product, 
and the readers of the younger generation 

[ 5* ] 



WILLIAM WARREN 



must submit to a recital which is, after all, 
nothing but a bit of the history of the 
American stage, with a margin of just 
attribution to a rare actor. Think for a 
moment upon the marvel of it all, — so 
trebly wonderful in this day of the sparse- 
producing player, — remembering that 
Mr. Warren's record stands equally for the 
highest skill and the richest productiv- 
ity. Imagine the mental speed and acu- 
men, the temperamental sensibility, the 
extraordinary power of memory both in 
acquisition and in grip, the complete mas- 
tery of all the symbols and tools of the 
profession, the huge mimetic and plastic 
gift, the vis comica, all of which are in- 
volved in the almost perfection with which 
the total feat was accomplished. Here was 
an unrivaled exemplar, also, of the docility 
and facility which were once supposed to 
be essential to the equipment of a great 
comedian. It was a part of the scheme, 
a condition which he accepted as insepa- 

[ 59 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



rable from the work of his vocation, that, 
within recognized limits, he should be 
like a French falconer, whose agents were 
trained to fly at any kind of game, from 
the noblest to the very mean. It is not 
to be doubted that Mr. Warren's refined 
taste was frequently and for long periods 
of time offended by the stuff of his 
text. But no contempt which he felt ever 
tainted his work; he was always faithful 
in every particular to play, playwright, and 
public, making the best of every charac- 
ter by doing his best in and for it. He 
would work — the reader must permit the 
use of many metaphors — with a palette 
knife in distemper, if he could not get a 
brush and oil paints; in clay and granite, 
when marble was not to be had; with a 
graver's finest tool upon an emerald, or a 
shipwright's broad axe upon a timber; 
now play merrily upon the tambourine or 
bones, and anon draw soul-stirring music 
from " the gradual violin " or the many- 

[ 60 ] 



WILLIAM WARREN 



voiced organ. There seemed to be abso- 
lutely no limit to his sympathy, practically 
none to his adaptability as an actor. Pilli- 
coddy and Touchstone, Jacques Fauvel 
and Polonius, John Duck and M. Tour- 
billon, Mr. Ledger and Michonnet, Tem- 
pleton Jitt and Jesse Rural, Sir Harcourt 
Courtly and Tony Lumpkin, Triplet and 
Dogberry, Goldfinch and Sir Peter Teazle, 
— that is the list of Mr. Warren's contrast- 
ing impersonations which I took for one of 
my texts in The Atlantic Monthly a dozen 
years ago. Fifty other pairs would have 
served about equally well, and the thought 
of any half a dozen of the coupled imper- 
sonations will avail to move my memory 
to glorious laughter, or to thrill it with the 
delicious pain of acute sympathy, or to 
enchant it with the recognition of consum- 
mate beauty. It is impossible to estimate 
how much such an actor has added to the 
pure pleasure of the community, or how 
potent a factor he was as an educator of 

[ 61 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



the general heart and mind. To a pupil of 
the highest sensibility, Mr. Warren's deep- 
hearted Sir Peter Teazle, in whom Sheri- 
dan's conception was at once justified, re- 
produced and developed, might of itself 
have gone far to furnish a liberal edu- 
cation. Surely, no decently appreciative 
spectator who sat at the artist's feet for 
a score of years could have failed to learn 
something of the difference between sin- 
cerity and affectation, breadth and narrow- 
ness, ripeness and crudity, in the practice 
of the histrionic art. 

The temptation presents itself, and may 
properly be yielded to, to compare Mr. 
Warren and the other most distinguished 
American comedian, Mr. Warren's rela- 
tive and close friend, Mr. Joseph Jeff er- 
son. To speak the truth will nothing 
wrong either of these illustrious players. 
It is to be conceded at once by a parti- 
san of our local comedian that no single 
achievement of his career approached, in 

[ 62 ] 



WILLIAM WARREN 



depth and suggestiveness, in significance 
as an interpreter of the deeper things of 
the spirit, in resulting potency over the 
general heart of man, that Rip Van Win- 
kle which, in the teeth of a thin text and 
fantastic plot, Mr. Jefferson has caused to 
be accepted as the supreme achievement 
in comedy of the latter half of the nine- 
teenth century. The touch of genius is 
here to be seen and to be reverenced. It 
follows, also, as a sure consequence, that 
Mr. Jefferson will be remembered longer 
than Mr. Warren. The power of an artist 
to attain or approach immortality in any 
art is the power of his one most effec- 
tual work. To reach this end, a large 
number of very good things are as nothing 
beside one superlatively excellent thing. 
Who doubts that Joseph Blanco White's 
sole achievement, his matchless sonnet, 
Night and Death, will linger on the lips 
and in the hearts of men, when the whole 
mass of Spenser's beautiful poems in the 

[ 63 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



same kind exist, if they exist at all, as 
studies in prosody? But these large con- 
cessions do not concede everything. Our 
Mr. Warren, by his vastly superior wealth, 
variety, and scope, has earned the higher 
title to the sacred name of artist, of what 
treason soever to his fame the ungrateful 
memories of men shall prove to be capa- 
ble. Personally, I make little account of 
that cheerful, chirping libel upon Dickens's 
creation which Mr. Jefferson has labeled 
Caleb Plummer, and no very great ac- 
count of that effervescent petit maitre y 
light of step and glib of tongue, into 
whom he has transformed Sheridan's clod- 
born Bob Acres, though I admit the ac- 
tor's delicate drollery in both impersona- 
tions. Mr. Jefferson can point, it seems 
to me, to but one work of supreme dis- 
tinction, the sole and single product of his 
life, the masterpiece of our stage, — the 
figure of the immortal Rip. Our Warren, 
like another Rubens, could conduct you 

[ 64 1 



WILLIAM WARREN 



through a vast gallery, crowded with no- 
ble canvases, of which at least a hundred 
glow with the beauty and the truth of life, 
every one bearing his firm signature. 

For many years Mr. Warren was a 
most interesting figure in Boston, not only 
upon the stage, but upon the streets over 
which he took his deliberate and slightly 
varied walks. His tall, large, well-formed 
figure, and his easy, rather peculiar gait, 
which seemed always about to become, 
but never quite became, a roll or swagger; 
his noble head, with the bright penetrat- 
ing eyes and the extraordinarily sensitive 
mouth, made equally to utter mirth or 
pathos or wisdom, produced the effect of 
a unique personality. His manners were 
the finest I ever saw in a man. With 
actors almost all things seem to be in 
extremes, to be of the best or the worst. 
The bad manners of " the profession " are 
the most intolerable manners in the world. 
On the other hand, an experienced Eng- 

[ 65 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



lish grande dame spoke once with know- 
ledge when, observing at a public assem- 
bly the rare charm of bearing of a beau- 
tiful lady whose face was strange to her, 
she said, " That person is either a member 
of the royal family or an actress." Mr. 
Warren's whole " style " — if the vulgar 
word may be permitted — seemed to me 
faultless. His grace, ease, refinement, per- 
fect modesty, absolute freedom from affec- 
tation, coupled with his swift responsive- 
ness in facial expression and in speech, 
made conversation with him a delight and 
a privilege. And to the traits which have 
been mentioned is to be added a peculiar 
simplicity, which appeared to be the quint- 
essence of the infinite variety of his life. 
I remember hearing it said, at a time near 
the close of the Great War, by some men 
who were native here, and to the best 
Boston manner born, that Edward Ever- 
ett, A. B., A. M., LL. D., ex-Gov- 
ernor of Massachusetts, ex-United States 



[ 66 ] 



WILLIAM WARREN 



Senator from Massachusetts, ex- President 
of Harvard College, ex-Minister to Eng- 
land, litterateur, orator, statesman, was, 
in respect of distinction of manners, in a 
class with but one other of his fellow citi- 
zens: that other one appeared in the lo- 
cal directory as " Warren, William, come- 
dian, boards 2 Bulfinch Place." It is to 
be added that Mr. Warren was the most 
reserved and reticent of mortals about 
everything pertaining to himself, and that 
he was extremely, perhaps unduly, sensi- 
tive to adverse criticism. When he bled, 
he bled inwardly, and of the wound he 
permitted no sign to escape him. He was 
a first favorite with all the actors and ac- 
tresses of his acquaintance, and was most 
gentle, helpful, and tolerant to players 
who came to him for advice or comment. 



l 67 ] 



IX 

Actual and Ideal Training for the 

Stage 

THE career of William Warren as a 
histrionic artist is of special inter- 
est for the light which it throws 
upon the vexed question of education for 
the stage. His exceptional record implies, 
of course, in the man, those exceptional 
native gifts which have been considered. 
But it is equally plain that his powers 
had been highly developed by training 
and practice, and that his art had been 
enriched and refined by intelligent and 
industrious culture. It is true that he had 
the right ancestral bent, and was born to 
the passion of the stage, and that the force 
of the inherited instinct and aptitude of 
the actor seems to be more potent than 

[ 68 ] 



TRAINING FOR THE STAGE 

any other that is transmitted through the 
blood. Mr. Warren was the son of an 
English player and of an American lady 
of an acting family, and counted among his 
near relatives a father, an aunt, four sis- 
ters, and many nieces, nephews, and cou- 
sins, who attained good positions upon the 
stage; Joseph Jefferson being one of the 
cousins in the second degree. His pro- 
fessional training, from sources exterior to 
himself, was obtained wholly within the 
only " Conservatory " of his youthful pe- 
riod, to wit, the regular old-fashioned stock 
company. Here he was brought into con- 
tact with the best acting of his day; here 
he had the opportunity to study at close 
quarters the speech, gesture, bearing, and 
general method of the dramatic leaders, in 
a vast variety of characters, changing from 
night to night; and here, as a beginner, he 
was subjected to the caustic criticism of 
the stage manager. From an occasional 
specialist he might take lessons in fencing 

[ 69 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



and dancing, practicing with his compan- 
ions what he learned from his masters; 
through observing other actors, and with 
the help of some of the humble servants 
of the stage, he would begin to acquire the 
arts of " making up." That is literally all 
the schooling that Mr. Warren had. His 
assiduous industry did the rest. But ex- 
perience shows that this schooling, limited 
and imperfect as it was in some respects, 
was adequate to make of good material a 
highly finished product. I doubt if Mr. 
Warren ever took a lesson in what is 
known as elocution; yet, by practice and 
imitation of good speakers, he made him- 
self master of an exquisite enunciation of 
English, which was a source of pure plea- 
sure to sensitive ears. 

The resident stock company as a school 
of histrionic instruction must be said to 
have passed away. Actors in traveling 
troupes learn from one another by snatches, 
of course; private teachers — often retired 

[ 7o ] 



TRAINING FOR THE STAGE 

actors, and sometimes of considerable skill 
— are fairly numerous in New York, Phil- 
adelphia, and Boston; separated by long 
intervals, in two or three of our largest 
cities, are Conservatories or Schools of 
Expression, of which some in terms pro- 
fess to train for the stage. To the person 
who wishes to become an actor only the 
last two means of instruction are accessi- 
ble, until he has got a foothold in some 
company. I shall have something to say 
by and by concerning our great national 
aptitude for the stage; but it is plain to 
any clear eyesight that the condition of 
chaos in respect of instruction, and the 
want of fixed standards at almost every 
point, are interfering seriously with our 
progress in the art of acting, and make the 
attainment of distinction in that art in the 
largest way, for the American stage, prac- 
tically impossible. It is unfortunate that 
the actors themselves are barren of helpful 
suggestions. As a class they have little ca- 

C 7i ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



pacity for generalization, and scarcely one 
of them appears to be capable of transcend- 
ing the limits of his own personal experi- 
ence. Mr. Richard Mansfield, lately, in a 
talk intended for publication, with elabo- 
rately insincere irony disparaging his own 
" poor " acting, scoffed at the Conserva- 
tories, which did not succeed in sending 
out graduates as competent even as him- 
self, who, as everybody knows, picked up 
his art pretty much at haphazard. There 
was truth as well as error in his strictures, 
— the truth being more important than 
the error. Thus far, our Schools of Acting, 
though conducted in some instances by 
men of ability, have failed in training can- 
didates for the stage. One fatal criticism 
upon the graduates of these schools was 
made from the first, and continues to be 
made: their fault in action and in utter- 
ance is declared to be a stiffness of style, 
which is generally hopeless. The explana- 
tion is obvious : the students of acting are 

[ 7* ] 



TRAINING FOR THE STAGE 

not brought into touch at the right times, 
and kept in touch for a sufficiently long 
time, with the stage itself. The French 
have solved the problem. The Gallic actor 
of high ambition acquires the machinery 
or skeleton of his art in the Conservatory, 
and, contemporaneously, in the theatre, 
learns to rid himself of the mechanical 
stiffness which is almost sure to follow 
technical drill in enunciation, pose, and 
gesture. If he did not get the lightening 
up and limbering out of the stage, with 
resulting freedom ot movement and utter- 
ance, the French say, his playing would 
suggest the operation of a machine, whose 
works are heard, and sometimes even seen. 
On the other hand, if he were not disci- 
plined in the Conservatory, his art, in many 
of its particulars, would be wanting in 
clarity and precision. The actor of the 
highest grade must receive, therefore, the 
twofold training, — the scholastic and the 
theatrical. They order all these things in 

[ 73 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 

France much better than we in America, 
and their success has demonstrated the 
justness of their method. Our actors have 
the root of the matter in them, — are sen- 
sitive, facile, intelligent, and richly en- 
dowed with the mimetic gift; but they 
lack the highest finish and certainty of 
touch, and the moment they pass outside 
the rapid give-and-take and short speeches 
of the modern comic or romantic drama 
they fail at many important points, espe- 
cially in gesture, in clean enunciation, and 
in the ability to declaim passages of mod- 
erate length, wherein a nice adjustment 
and proportion of emphasis are essential. 
A hundred instances might be cited. It 
will suffice to mention two: Miss Maude 
Adams, whose impersonation of the Due 
de Reichstadt in L'Aiglon — an imper- 
sonation of much beauty and pathos — 
is marred by the artist's powerlessness to 
enunciate intelligibly when extreme pas- 
sion and speed are demanded by a "ti- 

C 74 ] 



TRAINING FOR THE STAGE 

rade;" Mr. Mansfield, who, in the long 
speeches of Henry V., frequently so mis- 
places and misproportions his emphasis 
that the finer shades or larger powers of 
the Shakespearean text are lost. If our 
stage were to be wholly given up to trivial 
and unimportant plays, such a want of the 
best technical training might not much 
matter, though still it would matter. But 
the demand for the best dramas has not 
wholly disappeared, and there is no know- 
ing what the future may bring forth. 
Whenever Shakespeare or Goldsmith or 
Sheridan is " revived," and when a Ros- 
tand is born to us, we shall need a corps 
of actors trained with the finer precision 
and larger style of the Conservatory which 
is attached to a great theatre. 



C 75 ] 



X 

J. L. Toole and Charles James 
Mathews 

RECALLING the work of our great 
comedian reminds me of his con- 
temporary, Mr. J. L. Toole, the 
English actor, who long held in London 
the primacy which was Mr. Warren's in 
Boston and New England. Mr. Toole 
visited America in 1874, being one of 
many British players whose pinnaces 
sailed to our golden shores in the years 
between 1870 and 1880. These visitors 
presented strong contrasts in professional 
ability, — the ladies being alike, however, 
in possessing great personal beauty. The 
alien artists, weighed in just scales, showed 
a preponderance of merit. On the side of 
mediocrity: Mrs. Scott-Siddons; the brisk 

[ 7.6 3 



TOOLE AND MATHEWS 

Mrs. Rousby, who in Tom Taylor's 'Twixt 
Axe and Crown presented the Princess 
Elizabeth Tudor, afterward Queen of Eng- 
land, in the mode of an amateur, with 
occasional flashes of brilliancy; Miss Cav- 
endish, a large, ponderous, unimportant 
belle, who plodded sturdily over the dusty 
highway of commonplace; and Mrs. Lang- 
try, the absurdest of actresses, whose pro- 
fessional stock in trade consisted of her 
social notoriety, her face, her figure, and 
the garments and jewels wherewith said 
figure was indued, — the garments being 
tagged with their " creators' " names, and 
bearing price marks still intentionally le- 
gible. In the scale of merit were Miss 
Neilson, Mr. Mathews, Mr. Wyndham, 
Mr. Irving, and Miss Terry. Mr. Toole's 
name ought, I suppose, to be added to the 
list of honor. But his tour in this country 
was far from fortunate, and he made no 
deep impression either upon the critics or 
the public. I remember his acting, and 

[ 11 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



vaguely recall his solid comic power, his 
humanness, and his variety, with some 
pleasure, but with no feeling that his art 
was great or distinguished. The plays 
which he produced in Boston were, with 
scarcely an exception, flimsy things, whose 
vogue had depended upon his success in 
their leading parts. I fancy that he was 
not happy in his American environment, 
and that he by no means did himself jus- 
tice here. The testimony of my own mem- 
ory is strong only upon a single point, and 
that the worst point in his entire method. 
He persisted in repeating over and over 
again queer little tricks of voice or action, 
which were funny for perhaps once hear- 
ing or seeing, but would not bear reitera- 
tion. His British audiences encouraged 
him in this habit by their naif acceptance 
of it, I suspect; his American audiences 
would not tolerate it. In all my other ex- 
perience of the theatre, I never saw a com- 
pany of spectators freeze with such steady 

[ 78 ] 



TOOLE AND MATHEWS 

rapidity against an actor as on one of Mr. 
Toole's nights at the Globe Theatre, when 
in Ici On Parle Francais, he used a sense- 
less piece of stage " business," — which 
caused a light laugh because of its unex- 
pectedness, — and thrice repeated the ab- 
surdity. On the fourth recurrence of the 
offense, it was not only not rewarded with 
a single snicker, but provoked many ex- 
pressions of annoyance. 

In marked contrast with my faint recol- 
lections of Toole are my vivid impressions 
of Charles James Mathews. Mr. Mathews 
revisited this country in 1871, when he 
was sixty-eight years of age, and he 
seemed to me then, and seems to me now, 
an unequaled incarnation of the spirit of 
youth and jollity. The dazzling Wynd- 
ham, at less than half the age of the senior 
actor, was no fresher or gayer than he, 
and in speed of tongue and wit was only 
a good second to Mr. Mathews. The 
elder artist was not to be compared with 

C 79 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



Mr. Warren in the breadth and reach of 
his art, though he did some great things, 
of which I recall his impersonation, at one 
and the same performance, of Puff and 
Sir Fretful Plagiary, in The Critic of 
Sheridan. But as a producer of mirth of 
the volatile, effervescent variety I have 
never seen his equal. Nothing happier, 
wholesomer, or sweeter in this light kind 
can be imagined, and the receptive spec- 
tator of the comedian's playing often 
found himself affected with a delicious 
cerebral intoxication, which passed away 
with the fall of the curtain, and left naught 
that was racking behind. The laugh cure 
is the only mode which is accepted by 
the physicians of every school, and Mr. 
Mathews must have been a potent thera- 
peutic and prophylactic agent in the health 
of Great Britain. He inherited his histri- 
onic talent, and had been finely trained 
in the old methods. Even in France his 
style was considered admirable in grace, 

[ So ] 



TOOLE AND MATHEWS 

finesse, and dexterity. Sometimes he 
played in French. His enunciation was a 
marvel of incisive and elegant precision, 
effected with perfect ease, and often with 
extreme velocity. In his utterance of the 
lines of Captain Patter, in his father's 
comedietta, Patter vs. Clatter, he per- 
formed an amazing feat. There were in 
the play six parts besides his own, the 
total speeches of the six others being 
uttered in three hundred words. The 
drama occupied twenty minutes in repre- 
sentation. Mr. Mathews's portion of the 
dialogue was practically an unbroken 
monologue of between seven thousand 
and eight thousand words, which were de- 
livered in eleven hundred seconds. His 
talk went as a whirlwind moves, or as 
the water used to come down at Lodore 
when Southey's encouraging eye was on 
it; but no ear of ordinary acuteness 
needed to lose a syllable of his text. 

[ 81 ] 



XI 

Charlotte Cushman 

NEAR the time when Mr. Mathews 
made his last visit to our country 
Miss Charlotte Cushman was ap- 
proaching the close of her great profes- 
sional career, which had been broken 
by many withdrawals and returns, and 
marked by more misuses of the word 
" final " than were ever in the history of 
the world charged against any other artist. 
I saw her in her assumptions of Meg 
Merrilies, Lady Macbeth, and Queen 
Katharine, and in some of her less impor- 
tant characters. I thought her then, and 
still think her, the only actress native to 
our soil to whom the adjective "great" 
can be fitly applied. As I remember her, 
she was a woman of middle age, gaunt of 

[ 82 ] 



- :-- ,. 



Charlotte Cushman 



/ 



CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN 

figure and homely of feature, who spoke 
with a voice naturally high in pitch and 
of a peculiar hollow quality, but of great 
range. The beauties and all the other 
women of the American stage were mere 
children beside her. Miss Mary Anderson, 
perhaps the most celebrated of our other 
home-born actresses, bore about the same 
relation to her that a march of Sousa bears 
to a symphony of Beethoven. Her as- 
sumption of Meg Merrilies, in the stage 
version of Guy Mannering, was the most 
famous and popular of her efforts, and 
well merited the general favor. It was 
one of the few impersonations I have seen 
which appeared to me to deserve to be 
called "creations." The queer old bel- 
dame of Sir Walter's novel, a figure 
strongly outlined by his strong pen, fur- 
nished Miss Cushman with little more than 
the germ of her conception. The Meg 
Merrilies of the actress was sometimes of 
the order of the Scandinavian Nornse or 

[ 8 3 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



of the Grecian Fates, sometimes a fierce 
old nurse bereft of her nursling. At 
moments she was merely a picturesque 
gypsy hag, with a grim sense of humor; 
anon, in speech with Harry Bertram, her 
crooning, brooding tenderness and yearn- 
ing were more than maternal, and were 
poignantly pathetic; at the height of her 
passion she was a terrible being, glaring 
or glowering with eyes that reflected the 
past and penetrated the future, a weird 
presence dominating the dark woods and 
the cavernous hills, an inspired Prophetess 
and an avenging Fury. The wonder of 
wonders was that the performance was 
absolutely convincing. It was impossible 
to laugh at it at any point, even in its 
most fantastic aspects; impossible to with- 
hold from it either full credit or entire 
sympathy. In it Miss Cushman, by the 
magic of her art, compelled the natural 
and the supernatural to fuse. 

Her interpretation of Lady Macbeth 

t §4 ] 



CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN 

was great, the actress attempting nothing 
novel or eccentric in her conception of 
the character. The lines in the perform- 
ance which have fastened themselves with 
hooks of steel upon my memory are the 
four of Lady Macbeth's soliloquy near the 
opening of the second scene of the third 
act of the tragedy : — 

" Nought's had, all 's spent, 
Where our desire is got without content : 
*T is safer to be that which we destroy 
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy." 

I never knew a voice so capable as 
Miss Cushman's of saturation with an- 
guish; and in no other text do I remem- 
ber her equally to have used her gift in 
this kind. The words were accompanied 
by the wringing of her hands ; and through 
the first couplet, as she gave it, the listener 
was made to gaze into the depths of a 
soul, soon to enter the night of madness, 
already enduring the torments of hell. 
In the same scene, the affectionate solici- 

[ §5 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



tude of her speeches to her husband pro- 
duced an indescribable effect of the ter- 
rible and the piteous in combination. A 
spectacle it was of a great love, driven by 
its impulse to minister to the loved ob- 
ject; being itself utterly and fatalistically 
hopeless and barren of comfort and of the 
power to comfort. 

But, on the whole, Miss Cushman's 
impersonation of the Queen Katharine of 
Henry VIII. must be accounted her crown- 
ing achievement, and, therefore, the high- 
est histrionic work of any American ac- 
tress. I shall merely note, with little 
detailed comment, the grandeur and sim- 
plicity of the character as she presented 
it in the first three acts of the play. Here, 
her Katharine was a document in human 
flesh, to show how a heavenly minded 
humility may be a wellspring of dignity, 
how true womanly sensibility may exalt 
the queenliness of a sovereign. The bear- 
ing of Katharine at the trial, in the second 

[ 86 ] 



CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN 

act, has been discussed till the theme is 
trite, and Mrs. Siddons's interpretation of 
the scene and of its most famous line has 
been enforced, I suppose, upon her suc- 
cessors. The great daughter of the house 
of Kemble may, perhaps, have made the 
attack upon Wolsey, in 

" Lord Cardinal, 
To you I speak," 

more prepotent and tremendous than it 
was possible for her transatlantic sister-in- 
art to make it; but it is not to be be- 
lieved that any player could have sur- 
passed Miss Cushman in the unstudied 
eloquence of the appeal of the wife and 
mother to the hard heart of the Royal 
Voluptuary, who sat " under the cloth of 
state," his big red face, as Mademoiselle 
de Bury says, almost " bursting with blood 
and pride." 

It was in the second scene of the fourth 
act that Miss Cushman's genius and art 
found their loftiest and most exquisite ex- 

[ 87 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



pression. Katharine — now designated in 
the text as " dowager," since Anne Bullen 
wears the crown — is led in, " sick," by 
her two faithful attendants, Griffith and 
Patience. The careful reader of the text 
will mark the transition from the previous 
scene, filled with the pomp and throng 
of Anne's coronation and with sensuous 
praises of the young queen's beauty, to 
the plain room at Kimbolton, whence a 
homely, discarded wife of middle age is 
passing into the Valley of the Shadow of 
Death. Nothing of its kind that I have 
heard surpassed the actress's use of the 
" sick " tone of voice through all of Katha- 
rine's part of the fine dialogue. " Queru- 
lous " is the only adjective that will describe 
that tone, and yet " querulous " is rude 
and misdescriptive. The note was that 
which we all recognize as characteristic of 
sufferers from sickness, after many days 
of pain, or when an illness has become 
chronic. In Katharine this tone must not 

C 88 ] 



CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN 

be so pronounced as to imply mental or 
moral weakness or a loss of fortitude: it 
was but one of the symptoms of the de- 
cay of the muddy corporal vesture in 
which her glorious soul was closed. Miss 
Cushman avoided excess with the nicest 
art, but quietly colored the whole scene 
with this natural factor of pathos. A finely 
appealing touch was made on the words 
in her first speech, — 

" Reach a chair: 
So ; now, methinks, I feel a little ease," — 

which were spoken first with the breaks 
and halts of an invalid, then with a slight 
comfortable drop in pitch, succeeded by a 
little sigh or grunt of relief at the period. 
All that followed was exceedingly no- 
ble, — her pity for Wolsey in his last hu- 
miliations, her pious prayer for his soul, 
her just, intuitive comment upon his griev- 
ous faults, her magnanimous acceptance 
of Griffith's attributions of merit to her 
implacable foe. As the shadows deepened 

[ 89 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



about the sick woman. Miss Cushman's 
power took on an unearthly beauty and 
sweetness which keenly touched the lis- 
tener's heart, often below the source of 
tears. Her cry, out of the depths of her 
great storm-beaten heart, of infinite long- 
ing for the rest of paradise, after her vision 
of the " blessed troop," who invited her to 
a banquet, — 

" Spirits of peace, where are ye? are ye all gone, 
And leave me here in wretchedness behind ye? " — 

will be recalled to-day by thousands of 
men and women, and at this mere men- 
tion the lines will echo and reecho through 
the chambers of their memories. Katha- 
rine's one flash of indignation at the rude- 
ness of a messenger — queenly wrath, for 
an instant clearing her voice and lifting 
her form — made more effective the rapid 
lapse in strength which naturally followed. 
Capucius, the gentle envoy of her " royal 
nephew," the Emperor Charles V., has 
entered with messages of " princely com- 

[ 90 ] 



CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN 

mendations " and comfort from King 
Henry. To him she gave her last charges, 
all for deeds of loving-kindness to those 
about her, with an eagerness of desire 
which carried through her broken voice. 
Her messages of meekness and unfal- 
tering affection to her false husband 
were, of all her touching words, the most 
poignant. In her commendation of her 
daughter Mary to the king, who is be- 
sought " a little to love " the child, — 

" for her mother's sake that lov'd him, 
Heaven knows how dearly," — 

and in her word of farewell to Henry, — 

" Remember me 
In all humility unto his highness : 
Say his long trouble now is ^passing 
Out of this world: tell him, in death I bless* d 

him, 
For so I will" — 

the supreme point of pathos was reached. 
The throb and thrill of her voice in the 
italicized lines deserve never to be for- 

[ 9i ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



gotten. After the word " say " there was 
a second's hesitation, then the phrase de- 
scriptive of herself, " his long trouble," was 
breathed in a sort of sob, into which was 
concentrated with meek unconsciousness 
a damning indictment of her cruel lord. 

Throughout the final fifty verses of the 
scene Miss Cushman caused Katharine's 
voice to grow gradually thicker, as the 
night of death closed in upon sight and 
speech. But Katharine's last command, 
that she " be used with honour " after 
her death, and, " although unqueen'd," be 
interred "yet like a queen, and daugh- 
ter to a king," given slowly and with the 
clutch of the Destroyer upon her throat, 
was superb and majestic. The queenly 
soul had prevailed, and wore its crown 
despite the treason of king, prelates, and 
courts. After Miss Cushman, all recent 
attempts, even by clever actresses, to im- 
personate Katharine of Aragon seem to 
me light, petty, and ineffectual. 

[ 9* ] 



XII 

E. A. SOTHERN, SR. 

THE most noted achievement of one 
of our leading comedians, to which 
allusion was made in a previous 
chapter, — the Lord Dundreary of E. A. 
Sothern, the elder, — is peculiarly worthy 
of remembrance and of being freshly re- 
called to the minds of all who witnessed 
the performance. I am inclined to believe 
that the records of the theatre furnish no 
parallel with the experience of the actor 
and the public in respect of this imper- 
sonation. 

Mr. Sothern was a player of ability, 
recognized in his profession, before he 
became celebrated. The received story 
concerning the original production of Tom 
Taylor's Our American Cousin appears to 

[ 93 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



be substantially true. The manager was 
very anxious for the triumph of the new- 
play, hoping for a re'establishment of pros- 
perity upon the basis of its success, and, 
in order to increase the strength of a very 
strong cast, purchased the reluctant con- 
sent of Mr. Sothern to accept the unim- 
portant part of a stage fop by giving him 
full leave to " gag ; " that is to say, to en- 
large and vary his assigned text with new 
matter of his own interpolation. Out of 
this acceptance and this license a unique 
histrionic product was evolved. 

Even at the first representations of the 
comedy the public eye and ear were taken 
and filled with Mr. Sothern's extraordinary 
action and speech, and the other chief play- 
ers, of whom several ranked with the best 
in the country, in spite of their cleverness 
and the greater significance of their parts, 
found themselves relegated into the back- 
ground. The scheme and perspective of the 
author were much impaired, indeed almost 



[ 94 ] 



E. A. SOTHERN, SR. 



inverted as in a moment. It was something 
as if Osric had pushed himself in front of 
Hamlet. And no one was more surprised 
than Mr. Sothern himself. Whence the 
actor derived the outside of his impersona- 
tion I have not been informed. Its sub- 
stratum was the conventional dandy of the 
theatre, of course, — one of the foolishest 
and unrealest of fictions, — and Continental 
Europe had evolved a caricature of the 
traveling Britisher which adumbrated Mr. 
Sothern's make-up ; but the aggregation 
of Lord Dundreary's oddities could hardly 
have originated with the actor. I think he 
must have encountered somewhere an Eng- 
lishman whose whole dress, speech, and 
manner displayed the courage of a mon- 
strous eccentricity. Here, at all events, 
was a bird of a new feather, — of a new 
variety, species, genus. 

Who that looked upon the noble lord 
can ever forget the glare of his monocle, 
and the rigid play of the muscles that held 

[ 95 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



the glass in place ; the corrugations of 
his anxious brow ; the perpetually varied 
movements of his lips and chin as he strug- 
gled to utter himself ; the profuse hair of 
the period ; his long, silky whiskers ; the 
hop-and-skip walk, — that gait which was 
not of " Christian, pagan, nor man ; " his 
talk, in which a combined lisp, stutter, and 
stammer, punctuated by quaint gurgles and 
chuckles, made an unprecedented novelty 
in human vocalism ; and the long, sumptu- 
ous coats and dressing gowns and ampli- 
tudinous trousers which he affected ? The 
whole thing came close to the verge of 
gross absurdity, but through the actor's 
rare gifts in drollery and vivacious inten- 
sity was accepted, freely and with a deli- 
cious sense of immersion in a new kind 
of fun, by the whole public, gentle and 
simple. 

If Mr. Sothern had gone no further than 
to produce the strange figure which has 
been partially described, and to make it 

[ 96 ] 



E. A. SOTHERN, SR. 



effective for mirth, the event would have 
deserved only a mere mention. But he 
proceeded, with processes and results like 
those of creative genius, to broaden and 
deepen his conception, until his Lord Dun- 
dreary, without any loss, or rather with an 
increase, of his comicality, came to have 
a definite individuality, and to exemplify 
certain common weaknesses and limita- 
tions, which cause the brightest of us acute 
misery at times, but in him were chronic 
and the source of continual discomfort. 
The nobleman's text and business were 
enlarged fourfold, and the rest of the play 
was proportionally reduced. The devel- 
oped Dundreary was occasionally asinine, 
but he was by no means the idiot that the 
crowd had at first imagined him to be. In 
truth, it now became evident that the noble 
lord had a mind of his own, — peculiar, but 
real, capable of clearness, capable even of 
penetration and astuteness, but cursed with 
a tendency to err in dealing with the sur- 

[ 97 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



face resemblance of things. Life was a 
muddle by reason of these recurring like- 
nesses, and language was a pitfall or a 
labyrinth. It was a genuine grief and trial 
to him, though very amusing to the specta- 
tors, when he came upon another of " those 
things that no fellah can find out." His 
weakness was carried to the point of farci- 
cal extravagance, but there was something 
to sympathize with when he was most ridic- 
ulous, and one had new visions both of the 
inherent weakness and the latent capacities 
of our language when he said, with eager 
hitches and emphatic bursts, to Lieutenant 
Vernon : " Of course you can pass your 
examination ; what I want to know is, can 
you go through it ? " Closely allied to this 
mental infirmity, and another important ele- 
ment in the humor of the conception, was 
Dundreary's absolute incapacity to cherish 
more than one idea at a time. A single 
thought, whether great or small, brimmed 
his brain, and his cerebral machinery was 

[ 93 ] 



E. A. SOTHERN, SR. 



thrown completely out of gear by the in- 
trusion of another idea. The rhythmic mo- 
tion of Asa Trenchard's foot made it impos- 
sible for him to remember the words of his 
song ; the accidental view of a split hair 
in his whiskers caused him to be oblivious 
of Georgina's narrative ; a sudden discov- 
ery of her chignon, when her back was 
modestly turned, and the train of conse- 
quent meditation, broke him off in the 
midst of an offer of marriage. 

The funniest and most highly illustra- 
tive incident of this sort was the famous 
passage in which his search for his mis- 
placed trousers pocket passed from a usual 
automatic act to a mind-absorbing effort, 
and — with a perfect parallelism of effect 
at every stage — at first left his words un- 
checked, then gradually slowed his tongue, 
then stopped his speech altogether, finally 
required the united devotion of hand, eyes, 
and brain to discover the missing recep- 
tacle. Dundreary's mind had — to change 

LofC. [ 99 ] ' 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



the figure — a single track, with very few 
switches, and his confusions of intellect 
were the result of collisions of trains of 
thought, running in opposite directions. 
In a large way, Dundreary was an inclu- 
sive satire upon the small stupidities of our 
human nature, and his most inane utter- 
ances awakened answering echoes, as has 
been said, in the consciousness of the most 
sensible men and women. 

Mr. Sothern's Dundreary became, in- 
deed, something more than "a definite 
individuality," in the phrase just now used; 
he passed into a genuine and convincing 
personality. He was a true product of in- 
vention and synthetic art, and even his 
extreme eccentricities were soon accepted 
as innate, unconscious sincerities, not as 
conscious affectations. The noble gentle- 
man grew to be lovable, and the quaint 
conjunction in him of eager good nature 
with nervous irritability proved to be a 
source of charm as well as mirth. Ex- 



[ 100 ] 



E. A. SOTHERN, SR. 



traordinary were the variously combined 
expressions of complaisance, stupidity, hu- 
mor, and acuteness which flitted over his 
countenance, and the diversity of intona- 
tions which finely indicated the proportions 
of his much-mixed emotions was wonder- 
ful. A page might be filled with descrip- 
tions of his different smiles; the broad, 
effulgent smile which filled his face when 
he thought he had struck a brilliant con- 
versational idea, and his dubious, tentative, 
come-and-go flicker of a grin when he was 
feeling his mental way, being two striking 
examples in the vast variety. The surprises 
which he effected by his comic gift were 
often overpowering, and made the specta- 
tor fairly gasp and choke, as two contrary 
currents of mirth suddenly poured into the 
unprepared brain. 

I think the funniest small thing I ever 
noted at a theatrical performance was his 
delivery of one of Dundreary's speeches 
in connection with Sam's " letter from 



[ ioi ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



America." The passage began, " Dear 
Bwother," Mr. Sothern reading the open- 
ing words of the epistle; then he made 
one of his pauses, and, with a character- 
istic click and hitch in his voice, com- 
mented, — 

" Sam always calls me his b wother — 
because neither of us ever had a sister." 

Left without further description, the 
phrase might pass with the reader as rather 
droll; but on the words " because neither 
of us ever had a sister " the actor's voice 
became instantly saturated with mock pa- 
thos, and the sudden absurd demand for 
sympathy reached the amazed auditor with 
soul-tickling effect. 

Mr. Sothern played several other parts 
brilliantly well. His impersonation of 
David Garrick was surpassed upon our 
stage only by Salvini's. Dundreary's Bro- 
ther Sam he made an interesting figure of 
fun; and during the latter years of his life 
he achieved great success in The Crushed 

[ 102 ] 



E. A. SOTHERN, SR 



Tragedian, a drama reconstructed, for the 
actor's purposes, from The Prompter's 
Box, of Henry J. Byron, in which Mr. 
Sothern took the part of an unfortunate 
player, whose bearing and speech in pri- 
vate life were portentously and melodra- 
matically theatrical. There were many 
good passages in the comedy, and one of 
the most notable occurred in a passage- 
at-arms between the thin, out-at-elbows 
tragedian and a large-girthed, purse-proud 
banker. The actor had spoken of " the 
profession," meaning, of course, his own; 
the banker answered, with a sneer, " Oh ! 
you call it a profession, do you ? " and the 
player replied, with superb conviction of 
superiority, "Yes, we do; banking we call 
a trade," — the retort hitting rather harder 
in London than here, because in England 
" the trade of banking " was a familiar and 
technical phrase. 

The dialogue which was last quoted, 
and a half line of comment passed above 

[ io 3 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



upon a stage fiction, come together in my 
mind. It is not uncommon to hear close 
observers of the life of cities speak of the 
peculiar remoteness and aloofness of the 
theatrical profession from other orders of 
humanity; but only a very small propor- 
tion even of thoughtful persons come near 
to realizing how complete is the separa- 
tion of the actor and actress from other 
men and women. The conditions of mod- 
ern life, with the prevailing passion for 
publicity, incarnated in the newspaper 
reporter, whose necessity knows no law, 
and expended with special force upon the 
people of the theatre, who often seem to 
invite notoriety, have, in fact, accomplished 
very little in breaking down the barriers 
which divide "the profession" from the 
rest of the world. The race of gypsies does 
not lead an existence more alien from its 
entourage than the order of players. Here 
and there, actors or actresses of uncom- 
mon distinction or definite social ambition, 

[ 104 ] 



E. A. SOTHERN, SR. 



sought or seeking, make appearances in 
" society; " but such irruptions are few 
and intermittent. Mr. Irving is the only 
great artist of our day who has made so- 
cial prestige a steady feeder of histrionic 
success. Edwin Booth and William War- 
ren, with all their rare gifts, grace, and 
charm, were practically unknown in pri- 
vate, except to other actors and a few per- 
sonal friends. The prejudice of the outside 
world has doubtless been an important 
agent in effecting this segregation; but if 
that prejudice, which has been gradually 
diminishing, were wholly to disappear, the 
situation would remain substantially un- 
changed, I am convinced, for centuries 
to come. 



C 105 ] 



XIII 
The Isolation of Actors 

THIS condition, which from some 
important points of view is fortu- 
nate, from others unfortunate, and 
from nearly all inevitable, is unique in- 
deed. Here we have the only large class 
of workers which keeps the world at arm's 
length. Clergymen, physicians, lawyers, 
architects, merchants, tradesmen, and 
laborers of all sorts by the very terms of 
their toil, are brought into constant per- 
sonal contact with parishioners, patients, 
clients, or customers. Even painters and 
sculptors must needs be in touch with 
their patrons. But that thin, impassable 
row of blazing lamps, which rims the 
front of the stage, accomplishes what the 
Great Wall of China was built to accom- 

[ 106 ] 



THE ISOLATION OF ACTORS 

plish. Behind them is the sole " profes- 
sion ; " in front of them the barbarous 
laity. If the player desired to break down 
the partition, he would scarcely be able 
to do so. From the more important social 
gatherings, which take place in the even- 
ing, both actress and actor are necessarily 
absent ; the actor may vote, if he can ac- 
quire a residence and contrive to be in his 
own city on election day, but it is impos- 
sible that he should take any active part 
in politics or participate in preliminary 
meetings, caucuses, and " rallies," which 
are held at night ; and as to attendance at 
church, the player encounters, in the first 
place, the difficulty, inseparable from his 
wandering life, of making a connection 
with a parish, and besides, in recent years, 
is almost constantly required to travel on 
Sunday, passing from a Saturday evening's 
performance in one town to a Monday 
morning's rehearsal in another. 

Quite unrelated, however, to these out- 

[ 107 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



ward limitations of the histrionic life is 
the disposition of the players themselves. 
They compose a guild of extraordinary 
independence, which, in spite of its vague 
and shifting boundaries, intensely feels 
and sturdily maintains its esprit de corps. 
"Independence of temper," as Mr. Leon 
H. Vincent lately said, " is a marked char- 
acteristic of the theatre and of theatri- 
cal life. The stage is a world to itself, 
and a world altogether impatient of ex- 
ternal control." One cause of this temper 
is to be found in the legal disabilities 
under which the player labored in most 
countries for many years. The reaction 
was sure. Treated as an outlaw, the player 
became a law unto himself. But the causa 
causans lies in the peculiar conditions of 
temperament which inhere in most actors, 
and in the singular concentration and de- 
votion of energy, essential to success upon 
the stage, which are exercised upon the 



[ 108 ] 



THE ISOLATION OF ACTORS 

fictive material of the theatre. The rule, 
to which there have been important but 
few exceptions, is that the actor, like the 
acrobat, must be caught and practiced 
young, in order that the suppleness re- 
quired in the mimetic as in the gymnastic 
art may be attained ; and, as a result of 
the application of this rule, nearly all the 
great body of actors are devoid of general 
academic and scholastic training. Their 
culture is the culture of their own private 
study, worked out in the green-room and 
on the stage. It is marvelous what acqui- 
sitions many of them make with such 
handicaps ; but their general narrowness 
of mental vision may be inferred. Practi- 
cally out of relation, then, with the social, 
political, and religious life of the entire 
rest of mankind, immersed in the unreal 
realities of the mimic life, driven both by 
natural impulse and by professional compe- 
tition to whet their talent to the sharpest 

[ 109 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



edge, the guild of actors is the most charm- 
ing, naif, clever, contracted, conventional, 
disorderly, sensitive, insensible, obstinate, 
generous, egotistic body in the world, and 
— " unique." Players are as conservative 
and as superstitious as sailors ; they have 
but one theme, one material of thought 
and conversation, — the theatre, and, of 
course, themselves as exponents of the 
theatre. They hold to their traditions like 
North American Indians, and their con- 
ventions have the perdurable toughness 
of iron. Be the thing bad or good, once 
it is firmly fastened upon the theatre, it 
sticks indefinitely. The stage fop, now al- 
most obsolete, was a survival, probably, 
from the period of the Restoration, and 
drawled and strutted over the boards for 
hundreds of years after he had disappeared 
from society. Yet actors are distinguished 
by plasticity. That they succeed as well 
as they do in reproducing the contempo- 



[ no ] 



THE ISOLATION OF ACTORS 

rary life which they see only by snatches 
is little short of a miracle, and demon- 
strates the extreme speed and delicacy in 
observation of some of them, and the 
large imitative gift of others, together 
with a power of divination, which is an 
attribute of genius. Through the opera- 
tion of natural selection, they are practi- 
cally birds of a feather, and the most do- 
cile and intimate layman never quite learns 
their language or long feels at home in 
their company. That it is highly desirable, 
for a dozen grave reasons, that the actor 
should be less a stranger to his fellow men 
is obvious ; and also it is obvious that, to 
the end of the world, success upon the 
stage will involve in the successful artist 
a peculiar attitude of mind, a peculiar 
adaptability of temperament, and a rare 
singleness of devotion, which must sepa- 
rate him from the laity. Comparative iso- 
lation will always be a condition of high 

[ m ] 



/ 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



achievement in the histrionic profession, 
and the stage will always have a climate 
and an atmosphere of its own, with which 
the thermometers and barometers of the 
outer world will have no immediate rela- 
tion. 



[ "* ] 



XIV 

Charles Fechter 

DURING the season of 1869-70 
Charles Fechter played for the 
first time in the United States, 
appearing first in New York, and opening, 
in March of the latter year, at the Bos- 
ton Theatre as Hamlet. He was born in 
London, in 1824, and was the son of an 
Englishwoman and Jean Maria Fechter, 
a sculptor, who was of German descent, 
but a native of France. Notwithstanding 
the mixture of his blood, Charles Fechter 
was wholly French in his affiliations and 
sympathies, loathed Germany and all its 
ways, works, and words, and was careful to 
pronounce " Fayshtair " his surname, the 
first syllable of which Boston, because of 
its extreme culture, persisted and persists 

C »3 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



in giving with the North Teutonic gut- 
tural. In his early childhood he was taken 
to France, where he grew up, and, after 
dabbling for a short time in the clay of 
the sculptor, studied for the stage, and at 
the age of twenty appeared successfully, 
in Le Mari de la Veuve, at the Theatre 
Francais, of whose company he afterwards 
became jeune -premier. In Paris he at- 
tained a great reputation, though he was 
often censured for his audacious disregard 
of the conventions of the classic drama. 
He had had a polyglot education, and 
early acquired a good knowledge of Eng- 
lish, which he taught himself to speak flu- 
ently and with a generally correct accent, 
though it was impossible for him quite to 
master the intonations of the language. 
In i860, with characteristic boldness, he 
assailed London, playing Ruy Bias in 
English at the Princess's Theatre. His 
success was signal, and for ten years as a 
star he made England his firmament, also 

[ iH ] 



CHARLES FECHTER 



holding the lease of the Lyceum Thea- 
tre from 1862 to 1867. He was sped on 
his transatlantic way by the praise of most 
of the critical journals of the great me- 
tropolis, and by the warm eulogium of his 
friend Charles Dickens. His complete 
abandonment of England for this country 
tends to prove that he had outworn the best 
of his favor in the British Isles. 

In New York Fechter's interpretation 
of Hamlet was greeted with a chorus of 
disapproval, broken by emphatic praise 
from several high sources, and his innova- 
tions upon received traditions as to the 
outer particulars of the performance were 
the subject of much disparagement. The 
public, however, were keenly interested 
in all his work, especially in his assump- 
tions of Ruy Bias, Claude Melnotte, and 
other romantic characters. I thought, and 
think, that most of the vexed questions of 
detail alluded to were matters of leather 
and prunello. Fechter's reasoning - — de- 

[ "5 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



rived from a distinguished commentator 
— that Hamlet was a Dane, and that 
Danes are fair, with the practical conclu- 
sion that he played the Prince of Denmark 
in a blond wig, seemed to me of no import 
either for praise or blame; and as long as 
he, or another actor, did not defeat the 
Poet in letter or in spirit, I was willing 
that he should find, indicate, and manipu- 
late the pictures-in-little of the elder Ham- 
let and Claudius in any way that suited 
his taste or convenience. His conception 
of the melancholy prince was a different 
matter, and from first to last I held to the 
opinion that he did not rightly indicate 
the weaknesses of spirit and temperament 
with which Shakespeare has chosen to 
disable his otherwise noblest ideal, for 
the reproof, correction, and instruction in 
righteousness of mankind throughout the 
ages. The general public did not much 
concern itself, of course, with questions 
as to the actor's fidelity to the dramatist's 

[ 1x6 ] 



CHARLES FECHTER 



psychic scheme, but immersed itself in the 
novel and agreeable sensations excited by 
Fechter's vivid and impressive playing. 
New York, always more closely critical 
of acting than other American cities, and 
much influenced, no doubt, by Mr. Win- 
ter's severe censure, held out in many 
quarters against the new Hamlet. But 
Boston, manifestly relieved by the change 
from Edwin Booth's more conventional 
and studied, though far more just and 
intuitive impersonation, incontinently ac- 
cepted the French artist's performance, 
satisfied for the time with its outward and 
visible charms, its vitality, directness, and 
fervid sincerity. 

Mr. Fechter, at this part of his career, 
was, indeed, an exceedingly fascinating 
and eloquently appealing actor. He was 
somewhat handicapped by the plainness 
of his features and the bluntness of his 
figure; but his gift in facial expression 
was varied, and his countenance, at mo- 

[ »7 3 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



ments of stress, readily took on majesty 
or strength, sometimes delicate spiritual 
beauty. His voice was rich and sweet, 
and easily capable of emotional saturation, 
though not of the widest range. His for- 
eign intonations were numerous, as has 
been implied, and were very funny when 
mimicked; but, while he was acting, he 
so possessed his auditors that they seldom 
found opportunity to be amused. Per- 
sonally, I have generally felt, and often 
expressed, a distaste for broken English 
on the stage, and I regard the easy-going 
toleration of the imperfect speech of alien 
actors as one of the signs of the rawness 
of our public. Fechter's failings annoyed 
me less, however, than those in this kind 
of other foreigners; and, after a time, I 
even learned to tolerate the queerest of his 
blunders, probably because they seldom 
took the shape of faulty emphasis. Several 
important and common words he never 
mastered; even "love " — the verbal talis- 

[ "8 ] 



CHARLES FECHTER 



man, treasure, pabulum, and sine qua non 
of the comedian — he pronounced in a 
mean between /<?#/" and loave, to the end 
of his career. But with the appearance 
of Fechter American audiences first came 
in contact with an actor of great natural 
gifts and Continental training, who used 
the English language at his performances. 
In many ways the experience was a re- 
velation. Here was the culture of the 
Comedie Francaise, conveyed through the 
vernacular, and not under the immense 
disadvantage of exposition in a foreign 
tongue. One could see, as Fechter played, 
the potency of abundant but perfectly ap- 
propriate gesture, the action fitted to the 
very word, the word to the action, accord- 
ing to Hamlet's prescript; the.trained apti- 
tude for rapid transitions of feeling; the 
large freedom of movement; the ease and 
force of style which seemed spontaneous 
and unstudied, when most refined. After 
an experience of Fechter in tragedy or 

^ [ 119 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



romance, one returned to our great native 
artists, and found them, by contrast, rather 
cool and starchy. 

Nature, which had definitely, though 
not meanly, limited Mr. Fechter on the 
higher side of the intellect, had endowed 
him with a temperament of rare sensibility 
and ardor. Even if he had conceived the 
character of Hamlet aright, I doubt if he 
would have found it possible to embody 
his conception. Hamlet sometimes seems 
to be doing, and, when he is only mark- 
ing time, tries to make believe that he is 
marching. I imagine that Fechter could 
not have contrived to import into the part 
of the prince that tentative, indecisive 
quality which characterizes Hamlet's love 
for talking and thinking, and his disinclina- 
tion for persistent doing, which is made 
only plainer by occasional unpremeditated 
acts of violence. His Hamlet's feet were 
planted firmly on the earth; and his head 
was six feet above them, — not in the 

[ 120 ] 



CHARLES FECHTER 



clouds, where Shakespeare put it. But 
when the matter in hand was one of clear 
romance; when youthful love, or the 
power of loyalty, or the spirit of daring 
was to be exemplified; indeed, when any 
common passion was to be shown in 
any usual way, Mr. Fechter's playing 
was eminently effective. As Ruy Bias, 
his bearing in his servile attire at the 
outset was singularly impressive, — true 
native dignity without presumption, deep 
pride without arrogance, the simplicity 
of a great, unsuspicious nature. His first 
revelation of his passion for the queen 
awakened profound sympathy; and in his 
interview with Don Caesar, wherein one 
noted the manly affectionateness of his 
love for his friend, the actor's power of 
intensity of utterance and of swift transi- 
tions of feeling had remarkable illustra- 
tion: at one moment his heart's secret 
rushed forth as if it could not be stayed; 
and in the same breath he checked himself 



[ 121 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



in a spasm of self-disgust at his folly, with 
a half-mournful, half-humorous gesture of 
deprecation, but only to be swept away 
again by the torrent of feeling that must 
relieve itself by speech. In the great final 
act the actor's manifold power attained its 
maximum. Through his soliloquy, dark 
with his own woe, yet resonant with ex- 
ultation over the apparent deliverance of 
the queen, the agonizing encounter with 
his mistress, the discovery of the plot to 
ruin her, the triumphant entrance of Don 
Salluste, the humiliating disclosure of his 
humble birth, and the insulting proposals 
of the nobleman to the wretched queen, — 
through all these scenes the passion of the 
actor grew hotter and hotter, until it cul- 
minated in the thrilling passage where he 
snatched his enemy's sword from its scab- 
bard, and, with the voice of an avenging 
angel, proclaimed his purpose to slay the 
don as a venomous snake. In all that fol- 
lowed his action was of magnetic quality; 

[ 122 ] 



CHARLES FECHTER 



and in his final dying instants, in which, 
after the proud self-abnegation with which 
he declared himself a lackey, he held out 
his arms to embrace the queen, the eager, 
reverent tenderness of the action, and the 
look of love and exaltation which trans- 
figured his face before it stiffened in death, 
were profoundly stirring and very beauti- 
ful. There was no rant in any passage, 
and no evidence of deficient self-control. 
The charge of extravagance might as well 
have been made against a tornado as against 
Mr. Fechter's Ruy Bias, at its height. 

In The Lady of Lyons he achieved a 
similar triumph, which was perhaps more 
remarkable because of the material in 
which he was there compelled to work. 
Ruy Bias may be called great, without 
much strain upon the adjective ; but Bul- 
wer's play is a crafty thing of gilt, rouge, 
and cardboard. Fechter's acting redeemed 
the English work from the artificiality and 
tawdriness which seemed of its essence. 



[ I2 3 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



gave it new comeliness, and breathed into 
it the breath of life. The damnable plot 
upon which the action of the play turns 
has cast a shadow over the hero, which 
his fine speeches and copious tears, upon 
the tongues and cheeks of other actors, 
have failed to remove. But Fechter so in- 
tensified the cruelty of the insult received, 
and made the quality of Claude's love so 
pure, lofty, and ardent, that he delivered 
the character from its long disgrace. It is 
possible to raise a question as to the depth 
of the feeling displayed ; but, leaving that 
question unanswered, I commit myself to 
the assertion that Mr. Fechter's love-mak- 
ing was the best I ever witnessed upon 
the stage. In the gift of self-delivery into 
one short action or utterance, also, I think 
he surpassed all his compeers, though Sal- 
vini, Booth, Irving, and many other lead- 
ing actors have excelled in the same way. 
In the third act of The Lady of Lyons, 
when he turned upon Beauseant and 

[ 124 ] 



CHARLES FECHTER 



Glavis, there was a remarkable display of 
this power in Mr. Fechter, when he made 
three commonplace words, "Away with 
you ! " fall upon his tormentors like a bolt 
from a thundercloud. Mr. Booth played 
Ruy Bias and Claude Melnotte rather 
often in his early life, and briefly returned 
to them a few years before his death. 
His performance of neither part — though 
his playing did not lack distinction, of 
course — was worthy to be ranked with 
Fechter's. Booth's Ruy Bias seemed dry 
and slow in comparison with the French ac- 
tor's, and Booth's Claude Melnotte, which 
resembled a double dahlia, was insignifi- 
cant beside an impersonation that had the 
splendor and fragrance of an Oriental rose. 
Fechter was essentially a player of melo- 
drama, however, — a master of the ex- 
terior symbolism of the histrionic art, but 
fully qualified neither to search into the 
spiritual and intellectual depths of the 
greatest dramatic conceptions, nor to carry 

[ **5 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



out such conceptions to their just extent, 
or with a large grasp of their complicated 
parts, and the relations and proportions of 
the same. I have said bluntly that in ro- 
mantic characters, such as the two which 
have been selected for special comment, 
he much excelled our leading American 
actor. But it is impossible to conceive of 
Mr. Fechter as interpreting King Lear or 
Iago or Macbeth with any approach to 
adequacy. His playing was almost perfect 
in its order, but the order was not the first. 
I deem it worth while to record a curi- 
ous passage in one of the very few talks 
I had with Mr. Fechter, because the 
quoted words will furnish a good illus- 
tration of the certainty that a player who 
is using a foreign language will make 
some grievous blunder in handling a clas- 
sic of that language, in spite of his pains 
and industry. I was so foolish as to get 
into an argument with the actor concern- 
ing his theory of Hamlet, which I attacked 

[ "6 ] 



CHARLES FECHTER 



on lines already indicated. Mr. Fechter 
defended his conception, and declared that 
the prince did not procrastinate, but pur- 
sued his task with vigor. Quotations 
flowed freely, and I was about to clinch 
my argument by citing the words of the 
Ghost at his second appearance to Ham- 
let, when the actor interrupted me. 

" Now," he said, " what can you answer 
to this, Mr. Clapp ? Do you not recall 
the words of Hamlet's father in the queen's 
closet, ' I come to wet thy almost blunted 
purpose ' ? " 

That inquiry ended the discussion. It 
was plain that Mr. Fechter had never dis- 
tinguished " whet " from " wet," and that 
he had no notion of the force of " blunted." 
His idea was that the Ghost's declared 
purpose was to " wet " down, and so re- 
duce, the excessive flame of Hamlet's 
zeal. 

In a few emphatic words I wish to bear 
testimony to the merits of Miss Carlotta 

[ "7 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



Leclercq, who supported Mr. Fechter, and 
afterwards went on a starring tour in this 
country, playing a great variety of parts, 
both in comedy and tragedy, with admira- 
ble intelligence, vigor, and taste. 

Mr. Fechter's decline was melancholy. 
It seemed to date from his engagement 
as leading actor and general manager of 
the Globe Theatre, of which Mr. Arthur 
Cheney was proprietor. In the autumn of 
1870 Mr. Fechter entered upon this part 
of his career. Miss Leclercq accompanied 
him as leading lady, her brother Arthur 
being stage manager. Mr. James W. Wal- 
lack was engaged as second leading man. 
Monte Cristo was brought out by the new 
corps, successfully and with much splendor, 
on the 14th of September, and ran eight 
weeks. Then Mr. Fechter presented many 
characters in his repertory, showing a 
very slight falling off in his ability; and 
the public appetite for his product dis- 
played signs of abatement. Next came 

[ 128 ] 



CHARLES FECHTER 



internal discords, which grew chiefly out 
of Mr. Fechter's impetuous temper and 
his inability to get on with American ac- 
tors and employees. With scarcely any 
warning to the public, a rupture took 
place, and on the 14th of January, 1871, 
in Ruy Bias, he appeared in the Globe 
Theatre for the last time. During several 
sequent years, after one return to England, 
he acted in many American cities. Gradu- 
ally his powers began to fail, and his en- 
gagements were made with second-class 
theatres. It was pitiful to see the waning 
of his strength, indicated by lapses into 
rant, and by the development of slight 
mannerisms into gross faults. One of his 
clever devices had been the use of brief 
pauses for effect; now the pauses were 
lengthened out till they became ridiculous. 
It is probable that growing physical dis- 
ability accounted for this decadence. In 
1876 he broke his leg, and retired from 
the stage to his farm in Richmond, Penn- 

[ I2 9 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



sylvania, where he died on the 5th of 
August, 1879. 

I have known only one other case of 
gradual histrionic disintegration in the 
early life of a player. A native actress, 
who attained fame in her youth, and, in 
spite of many crudities and excesses of 
style, prevailed through frequent flashes 
of genius, first showed the subsidence of 
her power by the steady widening of her 
peculiar extravagances; then, suddenly, 
all vitality disappeared from her playing, 
which became a mere desiccated husk, 
with queer contours, rigid and fixed. 



[ 130 ] 



XV 

Edwin Booth 

THERE is no occasion for me to 
discuss minutely the work of him 
whose art was the crown of our 
tragic stage during nearly all the second 
half of the nineteenth century, — of Ed- 
win Booth, clarum et venerabile nomen. 
There had been scarcely a break in the 
reign of his dynasty for the seventy-two 
years between 1821, when the wonderful 
Junius Brutus Booth, Sr., began to act in 
the United States, and 1893, when the 
son, Edwin, after a life strangely mixed 
of gloom and glory, " passed to where 
beyond these voices there is peace." The 
elder tragedian died in 1852, and in 1852 
the younger, at the age of nineteen, in 
California, was playing "general utility 

C *3* ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



business." My memory holds an un- 
dimmed picture of Edwin Booth as I first 
saw him at the Boston Theatre, in Shake- 
spearean parts, during the season of 
1856-57, when he was twenty-three years 
of age, — beautiful exceedingly in face and 
form, crude with the promise-crammed 
crudity of youthful genius, and already 
showing, with short intermissions and ob- 
scurations, the blaze of the divine fire. 
From that point I followed him, I may 
say, through his histrionic course until 
its close, as hundreds of my readers fol- 
lowed him. We saw, with an interest and 
curiosity always keen and a satisfaction 
seldom marred, his gradual growth in re- 
finement and scholarship, the steady deep- 
ening and enriching of his docile and 
intuitive spirit, the swift experimental 
play of his keen intellect, and the broad 
development of that style in which the 
academic and the vital were so finely 
fused. 



C l 3 2 ] 




Edzvi?t Booth 



EDWIN BOOTH 



A famous nomen I called him even now. 
Alas ! the plain truth in plain English is 
that his illustrious name and fame and the 
tradition of his art are all that is left to 
the American tragic stage, which to-day 
is trodden only by the spirits of departed 
actors, of whom all but him are practically 
forgotten. A vacant stage, haunted by 
ghosts, visited by dying winds of mem- 
ory! One recalls with delight the purity 
of his enunciation, the elegant correctness 
of his pronunciation, the exquisite adjust- 
ment and proportion of his emphases, his 
absolute mastery of the music and the 
meaning of Shakespeare's verse ; and then, 
one may note, if one chooses, that the art 
of elocution, as he practiced it, is to all 
intents and purposes, for the theatre of 
1902, a lost art. 

A great tragic actor, who is dealing 
with material such as that which is fur- 
nished by the Great Dramatist, is usually 
driven by an imperious impulse to try ex- 

[ i33 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



periments with his text and to vary his 
histrionic conceptions as he advances in 
years and knowledge, and as his temper- 
amental force waxes or wanes. Edwin 
Booth furnished a signal and most inter- 
esting example of the effect of this im- 
pulse, which was of itself a proof of the 
unflagging vitality of his spirit. With 
scholarly eclecticism, at different times 
he made choice of various "readings," 
subjecting them to the test of stage de- 
livery, — often the best alembic in which 
to try their values, — and with innumera- 
ble diversities of vocal shading, ictus, and 
cadence sought to utter the Master Poet's 
thought with new delicacies or new po- 
tencies. I think it might be fairly said 
that his theories of the great characters 
were never wrong or seriously defective. 
And through his shifting ideals, as they 
were embodied from year to year, the 
spectator could discern the extraordinary 
variety of treatment which Shakespeare's 

[ i34 ] 



EDWIN BOOTH 



creations, because of their many-sided 
humanness, will permit. 

I have seen him play Shylock, some- 
times as a fierce money-catching old- 
clothes dealer of Jewry; sometimes as a 
majestic Hebrew financier and lawgiver; 
sometimes, at his full maturity, in what 
I suppose to be the just mean between 
the two extremes : and the Jew was terri- 
ble, vital, convincing, in every aspect. I 
witnessed the advance in his impersona- 
tion of Richelieu, whose theatricalism he 
succeeded in interpreting in terms of fiery 
sincerity, until the cardinal was equally 
imposing in his wrath and fascinating 
in his shrewdness and amiability. The 
changes in his conception of Iago were 
peculiarly noteworthy, the movement be- 
ing almost steady from lightness in tint 
and texture to darkness and weight. His 
early Iago was a gay, jocund, comfortable 
villain, malicious rather than malevolent, 
at his strongest moments suggesting the 

[ *35 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 

litheness and swiftness, the grace and 
ominous beauty, of a leopard, to which, 
indeed, in attitude and action, he bore 
a physical resemblance. His last Iago 
showed a vast deepening and broadening 
of the artist's idea. The subtile Venetian, 
still as persuasively frank in speech and 
manners, as facile and graceful, as before, 
now threw a shadow of baleful blackness 
as he walked, was Prince of the Power of 
the Air as he wove and cast the dread- 
ful " net that shall enmesh them all," and 
in his soliloquies uttered such a voice of 
unquenchable anguish and hate as might 
proceed from the breast of Satan himself. 
Mr. Booth's assumption of King Lear 
I put at the head of all his performances. 
The tragedian, as the " child-changed 
father," showed, I thought, a loftier reach 
of spirit, a wider and stronger wing of im- 
agination, a firmer intellectual grasp, than 
he displayed elsewhere, even in the other 
great assumptions more frequently associ- 

[ 136 ] 



EDWIN BOOTH 



ated with his name. That he had not as 
magnificent a physical basis for the part 
as Salvini is to be conceded; but Mr. 
Booth's Lear had been wrought into as 
pure a triumph of mind and soul over 
matter as the most idealistic critic could 
wish to see. Without extravagance of ac- 
tion or violence of voice, without extreme 
effort, indeed, of any sort, the chaotic 
vastness of Lear's nature, the cruel woe 
sustained through the ingratitude of his 
daughters, the fullness of his contrition 
over his own follies and his rejection of 
Cordelia, the moral splendors which illu- 
minate the darkness of his insanity, and 
the sweet anguish of his restoration to 
clearness of mind and to gentleness of 
thought, word, and deed, — all these were 
grandly exhibited. The progress of mental 
decay in the king was indicated with con- 
summate skill, Booth's interpretation of 
the whole of the third act being a lesson 
to the profession in the art of picturesque 

[ i37 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



effectiveness without superelaboration. 
In the final scenes with Cordelia the tra- 
gedian reached his highest point. Mr. 
Booth's ability in pathos was unequal, but 
in these passages it was exquisite and 
poignant, the dryness which sometimes 
marred his efforts in this kind being re- 
placed by suavity and warmth, like those 
of an April rain. 

Mr. Booth's limitations were obvious. 
He had little success in straight love-mak- 
ing; in some few seconds of his dialogues 
with Ophelia, the passion of Hamlet's love 
was mixed with a spiritual pain and un- 
rest, which somehow heightened every 
tenderness of action and utterance. Like 
his father, and all his father's other sons, 
he had small gift in mirth. It was there- 
fore of interest to note that his Petruchio, 
Benedick, and Don Caesar de Bazan were 
almost sufficient, by virtue of his vivacity, 
fire, and mental alertness, and, in the case 
of the last two characters, by the ele- 

[ 138 ] 



EDWIN BOOTH 



gance and distinction of his manners and 
speech. 

Through his Hamlet Edwin Booth made, 
upon the whole, his deepest and surest 
impression. In his performance of the 
part, there was retained to the last, con- 
sciously and deliberately, more of the old- 
fashioned formality and precision of style 
than he permitted himself in other imper- 
sonations, and the effect was sometimes 
that of artifice. But Mr. Booth elected to 
represent Hamlet in a style far less fa- 
miliar and far more remote from ordinary 
life than he used for any other character 
in his large repertory. It was not that his 
Hamlet was all in one key; that its moods 
were not many and diverse ; that the actor 
did not finely discriminate between the 
son, the prince, the courtier, the friend, 
the lover, the artist, and the wit. The con- 
trary was true. It was as full of delicate 
and just differences as one could wish. 
But, through its prevailing quality, made 

[ *39 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



constantly prominent by the tragedian's 
methods, certain definite and necessary 
results were reached. Hamlet differs from 
Shakespeare's other tragic heroes both in 
his supernatural experience and in his 
unique spiritual constitution. The grim 
effects of jealousy upon Othello and of 
ambition upon Macbeth, the griefs which 
work their torture and their transforma- 
tion upon King Lear, do not separate these 
men from others of the human family, — 
rather ally them with every human crea- 
ture. But the bark of Hamlet's misfor- 
tunes is borne upon a current whose dark 
waters flow from the undiscovered coun- 
try. Macbeth questions with witches and 
is visited by ghosts, but at every step his 
path is shown to be of his own making. 
To Hamlet, by the conditions of his life 
and his soul, is given the largest oppor- 
tunity for choice, and the smallest power 
of choosing. Mr. Booth, with careful and 
scrupulous art and full success, attempted 

[ Ho ] 



EDWIN BOOTH 



thus to distinguish the Prince of Denmark 
from all the rest of the world. His eyes, 
after the fourth scene of the first act, never 
lost the awful light which had filled them 
as they looked upon his father's ghost; his 
voice never quite lost the tone which had 
vibrated in harmony with the utterances 
of that august spirit. 

After all, there is a fine fitness in that 
closeness of association between Edwin 
Booth and Hamlet the Dane, which is to 
abide as long as the man and his art and 
his life are remembered. In his largeness 
and sweetness, his rare delicacy and sensi- 
bility, he was nobly human to the core, 
after the pattern of the most human of all 
the creations of the Poet. Like the mel- 
ancholy prince, he was required to drink 
the bitter water of affliction, and to hold his 
peace when his heart was almost breaking ; 
and, in its extraordinary depth and reserve, 
his soul, even as Hamlet's and as Milton's, 
" Was like a star, and dwelt apart." 

[ Hi ] 



XVI 

TOMMASO SALVINI 

MIDWAY of the quinquennium 
mirabile to which most of my 
reminiscences appear to be re- 
lated, to wit, on the evening of Monday, 
November 24, 1873, Tommaso Salvini 
acted for the first time in Boston, appear- 
ing at the Boston Theatre as Samson, in 
Ippolito d' Aste's tragedy of that name. 
During his early engagements in America 
he was supported by a company who 
spoke only Italian. Afterward, beginning 
with the season of 1880-81, he played fre- 
quently in this country, and was the "star" 
of troupes otherwise composed of English- 
speaking actors. This bilingual arrange- 
ment was a monstrosity, and nothing short 
of Salvini's genius could have made the 

[ 142 ] 



Toimnaso Salvini 



TOMMASO SALVINI 



combination tolerable. During the season 
of 1882-83 Miss Clara Morris was his 
leading lady; in other years, Miss Pres- 
cott, Miss Wainright, Mrs. Bowers, and 
other reputable performers belonged to his 
supporting companies. In the spring of 
1886 he appeared in Othello and Hamlet 
with Edwin Booth, who played Iago and 
Hamlet to Salvini's Othello and the Ghost. 
For many of the most finely discrim- 
inating connoisseurs of acting, in this 
region, Salvini became the first and fore- 
most of the histrionic artists of our day, 
and with nearly all "the judicious" he 
took, held, and holds a highly exalted 
position. His personality was the most 
splendid — the adjective is fit, and, indeed, 
required — that has illustrated the theatre 
of his time. When he was first seen here, 
the beauty and strength of his classic 
face, the grand proportions of his figure, 
and the vibrant, sympathetic sweetness of 
his voice — a voice as glorious as ever pro- 

[ H3 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



ceeded from a man — combined to over- 
power the observer and listener. As was 
said of Edmund Kean, " he dominated 
stage and audience completely." His train- 
ing in the Continental School had been 
thorough, and, in temperamental force, I 
doubt if he was surpassed by any player 
at any period of the world. His acting 
was of the Latin order, not of the Teu- 
tonic or Anglo-Teutonic ; it was, however, 
though always vital and strong, never ex- 
travagant; in gesture, though exuberant, it 
was not excessive; in its general method, 
it belonged to what, in choice from a 
poverty of terms, must be called the ex- 
haustive rather than the suggestive school 
of art; there was in it not so high a solution 
of pure intellectuality as in Edwin Booth's, 
but in its mastery, in the largest way and 
to the smallest detail, of the symbols of 
histrionic expression, it ranked, I think, 
above that of every other player whom 
the stage of America has known within 

[ !44 ] 



TOMMASO SALVINI 



the past fifty years. Salvini was Charles 
Fechter carried up to the second power of 
all the Frenchman's virtues, with scarcely 
a hint of his limitations. 

The Othello of Salvini was the assump- 
tion through which he most strongly im- 
pressed the public, by which he will be 
most widely remembered. Fully conscious 
of its magnificence and of the unequaled 
and terrible force of its passion, which in 
the third scene of the third act represents, 
perhaps, the highest conceivable stress of 
which humanity is capable, I personally 
preferred to it several of his other imper- 
sonations. It seemed to me that his Othello 
was Shakespeare orientalized and super- 
sensualized, at the cost of some of the 
Master's heroic conception, and of much 
of the Poet's beautiful thought. Salvini 
knew that Othello was a Moor, and a 
Moor he would have him in body, soul, 
and spirit; not such a Moor as he might 
have discovered from the wondrous text, 

[ H5 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



but a tawny barbarian, exuberant with 
the qualities conventionally assigned to 
the race. His gloating over Desdemona 
ill became the lines which displayed the 
depth and chastity of the hero's love, and 
in the fierce savagery of his jealous rage, 
during the last half of the play, the imagi- 
native grace and beauty of many passages 
were smothered and lost. In the murder 
of Desdemona, done with realistic hor- 
rors, and in Othello's suicide, effected, not 
with indicated dagger, but with a crooked 
scimiter and hideous particulars of gasp, 
choke, and gurgle, I perceived that both 
the letter and the spirit of Shakespeare 
were defied and defeated for sensational 
purposes. 

But thirty years ago criticism of this 
sort fell, as now perhaps it falls, upon few 
ears that would hear; one of my friends 
said that such carping was like girding at 
Niagara. Salvini's Othello was undoubt- 
edly stupendous and monumental. Leav- 

[ 146 ] 



TOMMASO SALVINI 



ing Shakespeare and Anglo-Saxon scruple 
out of account, it was great; considered 
by itself, it was homogeneous and self-con- 
sistent, — " one entire and perfect chryso- 
lite," or, with a suitable variation of the 
Moor's own phrase, one huge ardent car- 
buncle. 

In witnessing the Italian dramas which 
Salvini produced, the spectators did not 
need to be troubled with Shakespearean 
doubts and qualms. His Samson, which 
he played on his opening night in this 
city, seemed to me a supreme histrionic 
expression of the emotional-picturesque. 
The play, which was in verse, freely dram- 
atized the Biblical story of the Lion of 
Dan, had considerable merit, and was quite 
redeemed from commonplace by the char- 
acter of its hero. In Samson's mighty 
personality two individualities were fused : 
the giant, the man of blood, the slave of 
passion, was also the son of promise, the 
just judge, and, above all, the appointed 

[ HI 3 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



deliverer of God's people Israel. It was 
wonderful to see how Salvini's impersona- 
tion combined these two natures; express- 
ing with sensuous fullness all that was 
gross and earthy in the man, and not less 
effectually displaying the lofty conscious- 
ness of the leader and commissioned ser- 
vant of the Lord Jehovah. When directly 
under the divine inspiration, as in the 
second act of the play, when he perceived 
in the flames that consumed his house the 
presence of the I AM whom Moses knew 
in the burning bush on Horeb, the face and 
speech of the actor became glorious and 
awful in their consciousness of Divinity; 
and at lower moments, sometimes in the 
midst of unholy and degrading pleasures, 
a strange and mystical light seemed to fill 
his eyes, to touch and amplify his form. 
In his fatal drunkenness there was some- 
thing godlike as well as pathetic, even while 
the details of intoxication were shown 
with remorseless truthfulness, — touches 

[ 148 ] 



TOMMASO SALVINI 



of rare delicacy being made in the facial 
action accompanying the first draught of 
the " wine of Sorec," where the repulsion 
of the Nazarite for the forbidden cup was 
merged in his presentiment of coming ill. 
His declamation of Jacob's blessing of 
the tribe of Dan was like the tramp of a 
jubilant host. The long speech, in which 
he rehearsed in detail, with appropriate 
action, the story of his victory over the 
young lion that roared at him in the vine- 
yards of Timnath, afforded by far the 
most signal illustration I have ever seen 
of the ability of an actor to reproduce in 
narrative a series of varied incidents. The 
performance had the effect of a set of bio- 
graph pictures, with the added vividnesses 
of ear-filling sound, and, somehow, of ap- 
parent color. Another almost equally re- 
markable and even more stirring triumph 
in a similar sort was Salvini's narrative, 
in La Morte Civile, of Conrad's escape 
from prison. No other actor of our day 

[ H9 3 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



was capable of either achievement. In 
the Biblical play his highest point was at- 
tained in the fourth act, when he discov- 
ered the loss of his hair and his strength; 
and here his cry of agony and his frenzied, 
vaguely grasping gesture, accompanying 
the words, " Gran Dio ! La chioma mia ! 
la chioma!" were indescribably thrilling 
and awful. His Samson was in its differ- 
ent aspects as closely human as the Ajax 
of Sophocles, as heroic and unhappy as 
OEdipus, as remote as the Prometheus of 
^Eschylus. 

Salvini's skill was as high in comedy 
as in tragedy. His impersonation of Sul- 
livan, in the Italian play of which David 
Garrick is a replica, was ideally perfect, 
even surpassing Mr. Sothern's perform- 
ance in grace, vivacity, and distinction. 
He played Ingomar occasionally, in the 
Baron Munsch-Bellinghausen's drama of 
that name, and filled the part to overflow- 
ing with humor and virile gentleness. His 

[ 150 ] . 



TOMMASO SALVINI 



interpretation of King Lear was of great 
merit, though some of the subtleties of the 
text did not reach him through the Italian 
version. His Hamlet was quite unsatis- 
factory to American audiences, and was 
seldom given in this country; but his per- 
formance of the Ghost far surpassed every 
other that our stage has known. 

Without dealing with his other admira- 
ble assumptions, I wish to put myself on 
record for an opinion which is shared by 
hundreds of my fellow citizens. Salvini's 
impersonation of Conrad, the central per- 
sonage of La Morte Civile of Paolo Gia- 
commetti, has not been rivaled, has not 
been approached, by any dramatic pur- 
formance of our time, in respect of pure 
and heart-searching pathos. The story is 
that of an Italian artist, Conrad, who, con- 
demned to imprisonment for life for the 
commission of a crime of unpremeditated 
violence, after many years of confinement 
escapes from jail, finds his wife and daugh- 

C 151 3 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



ter, both of whom had been saved from 
want by a kind and honorable physician, 
and learns that his daughter, now almost 
grown to womanhood, has received the 
name of her protector, and been brought 
up in the belief that the physician is her 
father. Though strongly drawn by natu- 
ral instinct to make himself known to the 
girl, Conrad is persuaded, through a desire 
for his child's happiness and peace of mind, 
to conceal his relation to her* the supreme 
effort required for this sacrifice completes 
the work of his many sufferings and pri- 
vations, and in it he dies. The character 
of Conrad is built upon a large plan. He 
is naturally a man of violent passions, 
capable of furious jealousy, easily wrought 
to suspicion, and by years of solitude and 
misery has been made sullen and morose. 
Yet the spirit within him is really great, 
and, possessed by the passion of paternal 
love, rises to such deeds and self-denials 
as might be sung by choirs of angels. 

[ 152 ] 



TOMMASO SALVINI 



Every phase of the man's nature was pre- 
sented by the actor with fine discrimina- 
tion and full potency. But as the fiery 
soul was brought to its great trial, and 
prepared itself for the renunciation of its 
one hope and joy, the player's art took on 
an entrancing loveliness. From scene to 
scene Conrad's face was gradually trans- 
formed, its grim severity being replaced 
by a sober earnestness. The passage with 
his wife, in which they were united in 
their spirit of self-abnegation, where dis- 
appointment, desire, and grief swelled his 
heart almost to bursting, was deeply im- 
pressive, but served principally to lead 
the mind of the spectator to the last scene 
of all. What words can do justice to 
that, — to the exquisite pathos of his final 
interview with his daughter, when, strug- 
gling with the agony of imminent death, 
he endeavored, by caressing tones and 
timid gestures of tenderness, to excite an 
answering throb in the young breast, which 

[ *53 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



he would not press against his own, and, 
having borne the extremity of anguish 
and shame in her discovery upon his wrists 
of the flesh marks that told the disgrace 
of his captivity, found one moment of 
happiness in the offer of her childish 
prayers in his behalf ? The pain depicted 
was so awful, the heart hunger so terrible, 
that the sight of them could not have 
been endured but for the glory and gran- 
deur of the act of self-immolation. At 
the very last, the yearning in his hollow 
eyes as they glazed in death was almost 
insupportable, and was, indeed, so pitiful 
that the dread realism of the final moment, 
when the strong soul parted from the 
weary body, was felt as a relief. At the 
first performance of this play in Boston, 
I had the never paralleled experience of 
being one of a company of spectators 
whose emotion was manifested by audible 
gasping for breath, by convulsive choking 



[ i54 ] 



TOMMASO SALVINI 



and sobbing; strong men being specially 
affected. 

I must not lose the opportunity to de- 
clare the deep impression which was made 
upon me at this time by the acting of 
Signora Piamonti, who was the tragedian's 
leading lady during his first season in 
America. In none of the impersonations 
which she presented was the highest force 
required of her, and therefore I am not jus- 
tified in pronouncing her the equal of Ris- 
tori or Bernhardt or Seebach. But in the 
large variety of her performances, which 
ranged from Ophelia in Hamlet to Zelia 
in Sullivan, — corresponding to Ada In- 
got in David Garrick, — Signora Piamonti 
exhibited such grace, adresse, dramatic 
judgment, and vivid delicacy of style as 
the world expects only from players of 
the first rank. Her Ophelia was the most 
beautiful and poetic assumption of the 
character that I have witnessed, surpassing 



[ *55 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



by a little even Miss Terry's fine perform- 
ance; and the achievement was especially 
remarkable because the Italian artist could 
not sing, and was obliged to interpret 
Ophelia's ballads in a kind of dry chant, or 
monotone, with occasional cadences. Bet- 
ter than any one of all the other players I 
have seen, many of whom well expressed 
the Dramatist's idea, Signora Piamonti 
made Ophelia's insanity lovely as well as 
pathetic, turning "thought and affliction, 
passion, hell itself, to favor and to pret- 
tiness," according to the word of the Poet. 
Her Desdemona was charming in its 
unaffected sweetness, and in its final pas- 
sages indicated, with true tragic stress, the 
heroic loyalty of the wife, while preserving 
the feminine softness of the gentle Vene- 
tian. A striking contrast, whereby the 
breadth of her art appeared, was afforded 
by her impersonations of Delilah in Sam- 
son and Zelia in Sullivan. The latter was 
shown as a young girl of modern type, 

[ 156 ] 



TOMMASO SALVINI 



fresh and unconventional, but of a charac- 
ter strongly based in purity, intelligence, 
and refined sensibility, — an ideal daugh- 
ter of England, emotional, yet dignified 
and self-contained; the anxious, restless 
attention, crossed by shame and disgust, 
with which she watched the actor in the 
early moments of his pretended intoxica- 
tion was a triumph of the eloquence of 
attitude and facial expression, interestingly 
followed by the voluble passion of her 
oral appeal to his nobler soul. Signora 
Piamonti's Delilah, though kept at every 
moment entirely within the lines prescribed 
by good taste and propriety, exhibited 
Samson's mistress and destroyer like some 
flaming flower of the voluptuous East, in- 
carnadined in tint, heavy with aromatic 
odors, intoxicating to the sense of man, — 
the hireling slave of passion, yet almost 
redeemed at the last by the violent access 
of her remorse and self-loathing. Her 
final rejection of the Philistines' reward 

[ i57 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



of her perfidy was so mixed of rage and 
shame as to seem strong even against the 
background of Salvini's tremendous per- 
formance. 



C 158 ] 



XVII 

Adelaide Neilson 

NO player in my time vied with 
Adelaide Neilson in respect of 
the keenness of the curiosity and 
the profuseness of the admiration of which 
she was the object. Both curiosity and 
admiration were justified. As a woman 
and as an artist she was difficult to ac- 
count for. I do not pretend to know the 
truth about those portions of her life which 
have a dubious aspect. After she came 
to the fullness of her power the voice of 
disparaging gossip grew faint, as if there 
could be but one verdict, and that of ap- 
proval, upon a personality which appeared 
so refined in every public manifestation. 
It is known that her baptismal name was 
Elizabeth Ann Brown; that she was born 

C i59 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



in Leeds, March 3, 1848, and was the 
daughter of an actress of no great ability. 
As a young girl, she had employment in 
a mill, as a nurserymaid, as a barmaid, 
and as a member of a theatrical corps 
de ballet ; having been befriended, at the 
beginning of her career on the stage, by 
Captain, afterward Admiral, Henry Carr 
Glyn, a noted officer of the British navy. 
Through all the occupations just now 
mentioned she must have passed before 
she was eighteen years of age, since her 
debut as Juliet was made at Margate in 
1865. Her success was immediate, and 
her repertory soon embraced many parts 
in Shakespearean and other dramas. She 
made her first appearances in America 
and in Boston during the autumn and win- 
ter of 1872-73; and afterward, in a nearly 
unbroken succession of seasons, she acted 
in most of the chief cities of this country, 
until the winter of 1879-80. On the 15th 
of August, 1880, after many months of 

[ 160 ] 




Adelaide Neil son 



ADELAIDE NEILSON 



failing health, she died suddenly at the 
Chalet du Rond Royal, in the Bois de 
Boulogne. A considerable portion of her 
estate she bequeathed by will to Admiral 
Glyn. She acted frequently in England, 
also, during the last eight years of her 
life, appearing, in the course of one mem- 
orable engagement, in one hundred con- 
secutive performances of Julia, in The 
Hunchback of Sheridan Knowles. 

When Miss Neilson, at the age of twenty- 
four, first played in this city, her beauty 
and charm were on all sides declared to 
be of a rare and bewildering sort, and the 
public acclaim upon that theme was loud 
and sonorous. Her great ability, also, was 
obvious. It was easy to see that " the root 
of the matter " was in her ; that she pos- 
sessed the true plastic quality of the actor, 
native histrionic discrimination, and ex- 
treme temperamental sensibility. But her 
style, at that time, lacked the highest dis- 
tinction ; her voice, though usually very 

C 161 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



pleasant in quality, had many unrefined 
nasal intonations ; and in the interpretation 
of her text she frequently missed delicate 
opportunities, sometimes squarely blun- 
dered. It happened that she did not re- 
appear in Boston till 1880, and connois- 
seurs of acting were then permitted to 
note the effect upon her of seven years of 
the experience and culture of the stage. 
The change was remarkable : she had 
gained greatly in vivacity and power, al- 
most equally in breadth and suavity of 
style. Her voice had acquired an absolute 
clarity, with no loss of richness of tones. 
An extraordinary advance had been made 
in the finish of her work, which now exhib- 
ited, at almost every point and in almost 
every detail, an exquisite precision that 
testified to the operation of a clear and 
highly cultivated intelligence. 

The evening of February 16, 1880, when, 
after the long absence referred to, she was 
once more seen in Boston, was an evening 

[ 162 ] 



ADELAIDE NEILSON 



to be much remembered by every star- 
long-suffering critic. At last a Juliet had 
appeared whose style was as large as it 
was passionate and sweet, — a Juliet who 
did not color the words "Art thou not 
Romeo and a Montague?" with hostility, 
sincere or affected; who did not fall into a 
twenty seconds' ecstasy of terror because 
the orchard walls were high and hard to 
climb, and the place death to Romeo, con- 
sidering who he was, if any of her kinsmen 
found him under her window; who did not 
get out of temper with her nurse, and emit 
her " By and by I come " like a blow from 
an angry fist; who did not rush on from 
"Dost thou love me ? " to "I know thou wilt 
say ay," as if she were mortally afraid that 
Romeo would say no, and proposed to stop 
his tongue in time; who did not exhibit 
all the symptoms of a blue funk of terror 
while the friar was describing the conse- 
quences of her drinking his potion. These 
dettses, and many others like unto them, 

[ 163 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



some practiced for effect, some mere pro- 
ducts of misunderstanding, we had endured 
at the hands and lips of many noted ac- 
tresses. A large style here, suited to Shake- 
speare's large scheme ! A style, that is to 
say, which takes into account, at every 
moment, not only the text by itself, but the 
text as it is related to all the other texts, 
and to the Juliet revealed by them in her 
many aspects and in her total definite per- 
sonality. Not a studied, self-conscious 
Juliet, not a Juliet adorned with foreign 
excrescences, not a babyish, lachrymosal 
Juliet, but Shakespeare's own true love- 
taught heroine. Illustrations of her strong 
judgment, and of its cooperation with her 
delicate intuition, might be indefinitely 
multiplied: I cite only one other, which 
relates to a passage that crucially tests 
both the fineness and the strength of an 
actress's artist eyesight. 

In the first act of As You Like It, Miss 
Neilson's treatment of Rosalind's conclud- 



C 164 ] 



ADELAIDE NEILSON 



ing interview with Orlando was ideally 
expressive : the words, " Sir, you have 
wrestled well, and overthrown more than 
your enemies," were made to carry just 
as far as they ought, and no farther, — 
winging their message of incipient love 
to the young man's faithful ear, bravely, 
modestly, gravely, without smile or sim- 
per, it might fairly be said without a hint 
of coquetry. 

It happened that Miss Neilson played at 
no time in Boston any other than Shake- 
spearean characters, confining herself, dur- 
ing her early engagement, to Rosalind and 
Juliet. At her season here in February, 
1880, she added to her record with imper- 
sonations of Viola and Imogen, presenting 
Cymbeline on the 23d of that month, for 
the first time here within twenty-four years. 
She returned to Boston for one week, two 
months later in the same year, and on the 
night of the 19th of April appeared as 
Isabella, in Measure for Measure, which 

[ 165 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



until then had not been performed in this 
city. Her impersonation of Imogen was 
masterly, the adjective befitting an inter- 
pretation whose gamut ran from high pas- 
sionate force to the most delicate sensi- 
bility. In her interview with Iachimo she 
showed admirable judgment ; not falling 
into a frenzy at the disclosure of his base- 
ness, but, in her repulse of the libertine, 
combining courage, scorn, and loathing, in 
a grand demonstration of womanhood and 
wifehood. Her loftiest point was reached 
in the scene with Pisanio, wherein she 
learned of her husband's mad disbelief and 
murderous purpose. Here, at first, a hun- 
dred shades of fond hope, of anxiety and 
alarm, were depicted in her face; and when 
the blow fell from the letter of Posthumus, 
and she dropped to the earth as if she had 
been shot, her passion of grief seemed to 
pass beyond simulation, and in the speech 
beginning, — 



[ i« ] 



ADELAIDE NEILSON 



" False to his bed ! What is it to be false? 
To lie in watch there and to think on him ? 
To weep twixt clock and clock? " 

honest indignation, outraged affection, and 
anguish were uttered, without a touch of 
rant or self-consciousness, in a cry that 
pierced the heavens and the listener's heart. 
The feminine sweetness and physical del- 
icacy of Imogen were shown with true 
poetic grace; and among all the lovely 
images that the stage has shown, none is, 
I think, so appealingly lovely as that of 
Miss Neilson's Imogen as, emerging from 
her brothers' cave, she made her trem- 
bling declaration of hunger and honesty 
and her meek yet clear-voiced plea to the 
gentleness of the stout strangers. 

I must not multiply details, especially as 
a difficult and more important attribution 
is to be attempted. More than once I have 
spoken of Miss Neilson's beauty, and of 
the general enthusiasm over that theme. 
In truth, her face was not distinguished by 

[ 167 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



the regularity which the sculptor approves. 
Her forehead was broad and full; her eyes 
were softly brilliant, and their gray shifted 
into every appropriate color; her mouth, 
both firm and sensitive, had not the out- 
line of the conventional Cupid's bow; her 
chin was pointed, and protruded a little 
from the profile line. In the one interview 
I had with her, she compared herself with 
a notoriously handsome English actress, 
concluding, with a frank laugh, " But / 
have n't a featchur, I know." Yet on the 
stage her beauty irradiated the scene. The 
explanation is easy. She had a counte- 
nance over which the mind and spirit had 
absolute control, in and through whose 
plastic material they uttered themselves 
without let or hindrance, making it their 
exponent rather than their veil, as if, by a 
mystical operation of the physical law, the 
force of the soul were transmuted into terms 
of flesh. These words, which sound ex- 
travagant, are simply true. One does not 

[ 168 ] 



ADELAIDE NEILSON 



remember the beautiful Adelaide Neilson 
in -propria persona : the figures and faces 
which are associated with her are those of 
Shakespeare's heroines, every one of them 
unlike every other, every one immortally 
beautiful. I suspect that, as a histrionic 
artist, she excelled not so much through 
swift impulses and inspirations as through 
her supreme docility, discretion, and re- 
sponsiveness. She was always studying, 
evolving, and considering fresh ideas, elim- 
inating old faults, taking on new excel- 
lences. She afforded in her person a rare 
example of artistic and mental develop- 
ment; and I have ventured to go so far in 
my thought — now confided to the reader 
— as to believe that of her intimacy with 
the pure and lovely conceptions of the 
Poet whom she sincerely reverenced she 
was making a ladder upon which her soul 
was mounting and to mount. 

It remains to be said that, perhaps not 
for all, but certainly for very many persons, 

[ 169 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



Miss Neilson as an actress possessed an 
ineffable charm, which has never been 
analyzed or explained. A signal illustration 
of this charm was afforded by her Viola, 
in Twelfth Night. Of all Shakespeare's 
women, Viola is the most elusive. Deeply 
reserved, void of initiative, confirmed in 
patience, exquisitely fine in all the tex- 
ture of her nature, as pure as new-fallen 
snow, she is, however, not like Miranda, 
fearless with the ignorant innocence of 
Paradise, or Isabella, calm with the un- 
tempted chastity of the cloister, but is 
familiar with life and its lures, as well as 
susceptible of love and its enthrallment. 
Yet she passes through uncounted com- 
promising situations without a smirch, and 
in her masculine attire is no less virginal- 
sweet than in her woman's weeds. Miss 
Neilson's performance said all this, and 
the much more there is to say, with an art 
that was beyond criticism; keeping the 
character well in the shadow to which it 



[ 170 ] 



ADELAIDE NEILSON 



belongs, and at the point of highest tension, 
with a hundred deft touches, conveying 
the strength of the tender passion which 
could endure and smile at grief. But, aside 
from the distinction and charm, the sub- 
tilty and the depth, of the impersonation; 
aside, even, from the completeness with 
which the personality of the artist was trans- 
formed into that of Shakespeare's heroine, 
there was a quality in the performance by 
which it was related to some evanescent 
ideal of perfect beauty, to some vision of 
supernal loveliness vaguely apprehended 
but eagerly desired, through which it 
touched the infinite. Other of Miss Neil- 
son's assumptions had a like power; but 
the manifestation through this character 
was singularly clear. More than once I 
saw scores of mature men and women 
gazing through eyes filled with sudden- 
surprising moisture at this slip of a girl, 
as she stood upon the wreck-strewn shore 
of the sea, in the midst of sailors, and 

[ 171 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



began a dialogue no more important than 
this : — 

" Vio. What country, friends, is this ? 
Cap. This is Illyria, lady. 
Vio. And what should I do in Illyria ? 
My brother he is in Elysium. 

Perchance he is not drowned : what think you, 
sailors ? " 

In that slender maid, as she looked 
through Adelaide Neilson's eyes and spoke 
through her voice, the fairest dream of 
romance seemed incarnate ; in her the 
very " riches of the sea/' strangely deliv- 
ered from its " enraged and foamy mouth," 
had " come on shore." 



[ 172 ] 



XVIII 

Memorable Experiences of Single 
Plays and Artists 



A 



PPROACHING the end of these 
reminiscent sketches, the scenes 
of which must not be brought too 
near the foreground in time, I purpose to 
note several disconnected and contrasting 
experiences of stage and platform, which 
stand out in my memory by reason of 
some salient peculiarity. The moments of 
highest exaltation, among many lofty mo- 
ments, which came to me at any concert 
of sacred music, were passed as I listened, 
at the Music Hall, in April, i87i,to Chris- 
tine Nilsson's interpretations of " There 
were shepherds abiding in the fields " and 
"I know that my Redeemer liveth," in a 
performance of the Messiah given by the 

[ *73 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 

Handel and Haydn Society. The former 
of the numbers named was, in her mouth, 
a piece of idyllic religious poetry, the 
Pastoral Symphony of the oratorio, in- 
formed with a soul, and uttered, as it were, 
through the voices of rapt men and jubi- 
lant angels. The latter was the only utter- 
ance of the centuries' great Song of Faith 
to which I had, or have, ever listened with 
entire satisfaction. Then, for the first time, 
I heard the spirit's assurance of immor- 
tality breathed from its depths, not argued 
with its lips. Here and there, as in the 
words " Yet in my flesh shall I see God " 
and " Now is Christ risen from the dead," 
the singer, as .if overborne by a sudden 
ecstatic vision, broke forth with vehe- 
ment intensity; but for the most part the 
words were sung as by a soul communing 
with the Almighty, not as by a man de- 
fending a doctrine against men. So, the 
customary conventional exaggeration of 
emphasis upon the " I know " was dis- 

[ i74 ] 



MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES 

carded, and the stress was thrown upon 
" liveth," which, by some swift alchemy of 
tone or accentuation, was charged with the 
fullness of the soul's conviction ; while, in 
the closing passages of the air, the words 
" the first fruits of them that sleep " as- 
cended like the breath of one who longed 
to be with those that rest in the hope of 
a joyful resurrection. 

Time is most relentless in effacing re- 
membrance of the work of public readers. 
Let a strong word, then, be said for Levi 
Thaxter, who read the poems of Robert 
Browning in a fashion beside which all 
other attempts in that kind were, and yet 
are, prosaic, small, and faint. He was not 
a professional elocutionist, and his efforts 
were not deformed by mechanical artifice; 
his voice was sweet, pure, and of extraor- 
dinary depth and reach, and his enuncia- 
tion and pronunciation were elegantly fault- 
less. The source of his peculiar power was 
in his full sympathy with poet and poem, 

[ *75 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



and in his firm grasp of their thought. 
His reading, as an illumination of the 
text, was marvelous, and fairly compelled 
Browning to be comprehensible, even in 
works as subtle and obscure as La Saisiaz. 
Mr. Thaxter's dramatic gift was nothing 
short of magnificent, and I put his read- 
ing of the dialogue of Ottima and Sebald, 
in Pippa Passes, in the same class, for 
force and completeness, with Mrs. Kem- 
ble's reading of the Shakespearean trage- 
dies. 

In quite another kind, but unique and 
highly remarkable, was the reading of 
Shelley's and Keats's poetry by Mr. Wil- 
liam Ordway Partridge, now noted as a 
sculptor. Not much of the verse of Shel- 
ley will bear putting under the logician's 
press or into the analyst's crucible; but 
some of it is the fine wine of poetry, — 
poetry for poets, as has been cleverly said, 
appealing to the subtlest parts of the im- 
aginative sense, as remote from the com- 

[ 176 ] 



MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES 

mon touch as a rosy cloud dissolving in a 
sunset glow. Mr. Partridge read Shelley 
as if he were the author as well as the 
interpreter of the verse. His refined and 
delicate beauty of face, intensified by a 
rapturous expression as if he were thrilled 
by the melody which he made; the clear 
tones of his cultivated voice, not widely 
varied in modulation, but perfect within 
a sufficient range; his absolute plasticity 
and responsiveness under the thrill of the 
music, combined to give his reading an 
exquisitely appropriate distinction. There 
was, indeed, in his delivery something 
singularly lovely and impossible to de- 
scribe, — the product, apparently, of a gift, 
like Shelley's own, to charge mere sound 
with sense, so that it seemed to bear a 
message almost without the help of ar- 
ticulate utterance. 

The reference to Mrs. Kemble suggests 
a contrast sharply noted in my mind a few 
years ago. As a very young man, I had the 

[ *77 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



keen delight of hearing Mrs. Fanny Kem- 
ble at one of the last series of readings 
which she gave in the Meionaon. I viv- 
idly recall the occasion when I listened 
to her delivery of The Merry Wives of 
Windsor, and was one of an audience 
which laughed itself almost faint over her 
interpretation of Falstaff. A middle-aged 
Englishwoman, in usual afternoon costume, 
read from an ungarnished platform, out of 
the big book which had come down to 
her from her aunt, Mrs. Siddons ! Some 
thirty years later I was present at Mr. 
Beerbohm Tree's opening night in Boston, 
and saw the leading actor — " made up " 
with extreme skill, assisted by an accom- 
plished company, using all the appliances 
of an excellent stage — succeed in carry- 
ing the part of Sir John Falstaff, in the 
same comedy, through an entire evening 
without once evoking a laugh for his in- 
comparably humorous text. 

Another case of professional misfit, which 

[ 178 ] 



MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES 

worked less serious results, and, indeed, 
made a remarkable display of ingenuity, 
appeared during Miss Genevieve Ward's 
last engagement in Boston. The play was 
Henry VIIL, Miss Ward impersonating 
Queen Katharine. Mr. Louis James, her 
leading man, was cast for Cardinal Wol- 
sey. The cardinal's part is long and hard 
to ^learn, and very likely was new to Mr. 
James, whose position was onerous. He 
got through the evening without incurring 
or causing disaster. He hit his cues with 
necessary precision; and it is also true 
that he performed the astounding feat of 
presenting Wolsey's words in an original 
paraphrase ex tempore. Of the cardinal's 
lines not so many as one in three were ex- 
actly reproduced, even the most familiar 
sustaining some twist or variation. Some- 
times the original text was entirely sup- 
pressed. But Mr. James's speech did not 
halt, and his mind demonstrated extreme 
adresse, furnishing his tongue with phrases 

[ m ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



which carried a considerable portion of 
the Dramatist's meaning, and even fell de- 
cently in accord with the rhythmic scheme 
of the verse. William Shakespeare, or 
John Fletcher, or whoever is responsible 
for Wolsey's share of the dialogue, would 
have been tickled by the actor's perform- 
ance, which was in the line of the " de- 
scant " that Elizabethan gentlemen were 
expected to be able to supply with the 
voice, upon any melody, at short notice. 

Madame Janauschek is so near the pre- 
sent day that it has seemed best to me not 
to make her work the theme of extended 
comment. Her achievement on our stage 
was great, considering the handicap which 
she sustained in dealing with a foreign 
language; she had a large style, and her 
playing was steadily marked by intellectual 
clarity and emotional power. Her unique 
performance, the assumption of the French 
waiting maid, Hortense, in the stage ver- 
sion of Dickens's Bleak House, played 

C 180 ] 



MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES 

under the name of Chesney Wold, is not 
likely to be forgotten by any who were 
so fortunate as to witness it. The French 
accents and intonations of the girl were 
made piquantly effective through the op- 
eration of a tongue more familiar with 
them than with English vocables, and the 
feline malice and alertness of the char- 
acter — which in the novel is scantily 
outlined — were reproduced with high 
picturesqueness and vivacity. 

By natural association with Madame 
Janauschek's achievement, there occurs to 
my mind the rarest example I have known 
of the fortunate fitting of an alien actor 
to a part in which all his lingual imperfec- 
tions made for ideal success. On the even- 
ing of November 5, 1889, at the Tremont 
Theatre was performed a dramatic version 
of Mr. Howells's novel, A Foregone Con- 
clusion, with Alexander Salvini as Don 
Ippolito. The play "was caviare to the 
general," and was obviously deficient in 

[ 181 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



constructive skill; but its gay wit, its lav- 
ish humor, — now frank and direct, now 
sly and ironical, — its intuitive schemes 
of character, its broad human sympathy, 
its reproduction of the atmosphere and 
beauty of Venice, and its literary distinc- 
tion made its presentation delightful to the 
critical few. As for Alexander Salvini, — 
of whom, as an artist, I entertained, in 
general, a rather low opinion, finding him 
in his larger attempts pretty steadily com- 
monplace, — his impersonation of Don Ip- 
polito was a marvel. Every native physi- 
cal peculiarity of the player repeated the 
figure of the romance, and the priest's 
Italianic English was the actor's very own 
dialect. It is to be added that the Don's 
timid sweetness, naivete, and humility, 
and his shy yet substantial manliness, with 
their overlay of southern finesse, were 
clearly appreciated and nicely indicated. 

The performance, on the evening of 
May 14, 1888, at the Park Theatre, of Mr. 

[ 182 ] 



MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES 

George P. Lathrop's drama of Elaine has 
taken a little niche of its own in my mind 
and memory. The play, which was in 
blank verse, had real merit : its text was 
always smooth, sweet, and graceful, and 
was fine or fervid in a mode much like 
that of Tennyson, the story of whose idyl 
was strictly followed until the final pas- 
sages, when grave liberties were taken with 
Launcelot and Guinevere. The effect of 
the work and its representation was to 
transport the soul of the spectator out of 
the dusty glare of common day into the 
empurpled twilight of romance. Through 
Miss Annie Russell the play was supplied 
with an ideal Elaine. The actress had but 
recently recovered from a severe illness, 
and her fragile beauty and delicacy pa- 
thetically befitted the lily maid of Astolat. 
Her gentle speech had a thrilling quality 
which seemed made to utter the heart of 
Elaine. Few of those who saw the scene 
will forget how, after love for Launcelot 

C 183 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



had entered her soul, she began to look at 
him with a gaze as direct as unhesitating, 
and as maidenly as full moonlight. At 
great moments the concentration and sim- 
plicity of her style exactly fulfilled the 
difficult conditions of the part ; the shud- 
der with which she caught and held her 
breath when Launcelot kissed her fore- 
head, the gasping pain of the sequent 
words, " Mercy, my lord," and the dry 
despair of her " Of all this will I nothing," 
will be long and deservedly remembered. 
Few more beautiful scenes have been 
shown upon the stage than the fifth tableau, 
which reproduced a famous picture, and 
exhibited the barge, draped in black samite, 
bearing the body of the maiden — pale as 
the lily which her right hand held, the 
" dead oar'd by the dumb " old servitor 
— upward with the flood. 



[ 184 ] 



XIX 

An American Theatre Privately 
Endowed 

MY last word may well bear my 
message of desire and hope for 
the theatre in America. Some 
fourteen years ago, I began to contend in 
public for the establishment in one of our 
largest cities of a playhouse which should 
be supported or " backed " by the munifi- 
cence of two or more men of great wealth 
and proportionate intelligence, — even as 
the Symphony Orchestra in Boston is 
maintained by one public-spirited gentle- 
man. It is to be a theatre libre in that it 
is to be absolutely absolved from slavery 
to its patrons and box office. As a place 
of edification, it is not to be a kindergarten 
for infants who still suck their sustenance 

[ 185 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



from a " vaudeville " bottle, nor a primary 
or grammar school for small children, 
but a high school or university for adults, 
dedicated to the higher culture of that 
great " humanity," the histrionic art. For 
this house are to be engaged the best- 
equipped managers, and the most highly 
accomplished company of actors, artists, 
and artisans that the country can furnish; 
and on its stage are to be produced, with 
the closest attainable approximation to 
completeness, only clean plays, of real 
merit. These dramas are to be in every 
key and color, of any and every nation, of 
any period in time. Rare inducements 
will be held out for the production of new 
and original works, of which the censor- 
ship will be critical, yet catholic and un- 
niggardly ; but there will be no limitation 
of the field to the domestic inclosure. 
This theatre once open and operant, let 
the dear public attend or not, as it pleases; 



[ 186 ] 



AN ENDOWED THEATRE 

and let the experiment be faithfully tried 
for three years. 

From the effecting of such a scheme I 
did not expect, soon or ever, every con- 
ceivable advantage. I did not, in prevision, 
anticipate the speedy regeneration of the 
theatre as an "institution," the prompt 
suppression of cheap and vulgar plays, the 
immediate elevation of public taste. But 
I was confident — judging by the success 
of similar enterprises, and by the paral- 
lelism of European theatres maintained 
by national and civic subsidies or organ- 
ized subscription — that salutary results 
would flow from a theatre thus maintained 
and managed. This playhouse would at 
once be the talk of the country ; and the 
city that contained it would soon be a 
dramatic Mecca, drawing to itself from 
every part of the land true amateurs of 
the drama and of acting. A standard of 
high excellence would be set up, and held 
up to view, in respect both of material of 

[ 187 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



programme and mode of representation. 
By and by our swift people would respond 
and appreciate. Before many years had 
passed, we should have our own American 
Theatre, evolving the material of a fine 
tradition, dedicated to the best expression 
of a great art; and by the time that point 
was reached, Conservatories of Acting 
would be clustered about the new house, 
and be preparing to feed its companies 
with trained actors and actresses. 

Much good ought eventually to come 
to the theatrical profession out of the 
maintenance of such a privately endowed 
theatre: first and obviously, through the 
higher esteem and appreciation which ac- 
tors would then receive from the public; 
secondly, through the advance in means 
of training which would be open to neo- 
phytes. It will be a shame if we do not 
develop a great race of actors in this coun- 
try. The American temperament is, I be- 
lieve, the best adapted of any in the world 

[ 188 ] 



AN ENDOWED THEATRE 

for histrionic success. As a nation we unite 
English thoughtfulness, steadfastness, and 
aplomb with Gallic vivacity, intuition, and 
speed. It is true, as I said in a former 
article, that our native artists show ex- 
traordinary swiftness and sensibility and a 
very large mimetic gift, and that the gen- 
eral level of histrionic attainment is high, 
considering the desultory character of the 
instruction upon which a large majority of 
our players are obliged to depend. There- 
fore, not only very good, but the very best 
things are to be hoped for, when our ad- 
mirable domestic material is treated by 
competent masters, in schools attached to 
a theatre of the highest grade. 

It is hardly necessary for me to say that 
it is my idea that the leaven of such an 
American Theatre would work sooner or 
later in the lump as a discourager of the 
prevailing rlimsiness and triviality of our 
public shows. Thus far, by the quality of 
the supply of plays proceeding from Ameri- 

[ 189 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



can writers, one can gauge the quality of 
the demand. Our authors do not lack clev- 
erness : Mr. Barnard, Mr. Belasco, Mr. 
Thomas, Mr. Howard, Mr. Gillette, Mr. 
Fitch, and others show real ability. But 
when one considers that Mr. Gillette's 
Secret Service — theatrically effective — 
represents the high- water mark, "up to 
date," of our playwriting ; that it is, so to 
speak, the Hamlet of American dramatic 
literature, it is evident that something is 
needed to direct our feet into other ways, 
if we aspire to any great achievements in 
this kind for our country. 

There can be no doubt that the pro- 
posed theatre, if it became successful and 
permanent, would do something to de- 
velop and elevate public taste in respect 
of players as well as plays. It would be 
refreshing — especially in Boston, the naif 
and omnivorous — to note a progress up- 
ward on this line. Apparently, the move- 
ment of late years has been in the other 

[ 190 ] 



AN ENDOWED THEATRE 

direction. I saw it noted as a remarkable 
circumstance, in one of my criticisms of 
Mr. Fechter and Miss Leclercq, more than 
twenty-five years ago, that the chief artists 
were called before the curtain " as many 
as five times " at the end of the most im- 
portant act of a classic play. On the night 
when Cyrano de Bergerac was first pro- 
duced in Paris, elderly men shouted their 
bravos, and, at the close of the third act, 
embraced one another, with tears of joy, 
crying out, "Le Cid! Le Cid!" If that 
spectacle, which is truly impressive, seems 
absurd to a Bostonian, what has he to say 
to one of his own first-night audiences, 
which, a few years since, brought a pleas- 
ing little actress, who had done a bit of 
pretty comedy gracefully and piquantly, 
seventeen times to the footlights, midway 
of the performance, bestowing such honors 
and plaudits upon the player as she would 
scarcely have deserved if she had been 
Miss Neilson and Miss Cushman rolled 

[ 191 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



into one, and doing her greatest work in a 
play of commanding power ? 

As a mere Bostonian, indeed, I should 
like to see some uplifting agency brought 
to bear upon the taste of my native town. 
New York, though cynical and capricious, 
and scandaled by a clamor which charges 
some of its newspapers with bondage to 
some of its theatres, has developed a taste 
of some fastidiousness and discrimination. 
Boston stays childishly greedy, the pet of 
all the theatrical managers, with whom it 
ranks as " the first show town" of America, 
— the place, that is to say, whose patronage 
for every form of theatrical entertainment, 
bad and good, is surest and, in proportion 
to its size, largest. 

A better day for the drama and the thea- 
tre in America is sure to dawn. The actors 
are readier than the public for a change to 
nobler conditions; and the public, now 
learning to demand of and for itself the 
best things in many departments of life, 

[ l 9* ] 



AN ENDOWED THEATRE 

will not always rest content with condi- 
tions that encourage mediocrity, and do 
discourage vulgarity, in that Theatre upon 
which it depends for the larger part of its 
entertainment. 



C *93 3 



XX 

Henry Irving 

TO say that of all the actors who 
have appeared in this country Mr. 
Irving is the hardest to criticise 
fairly and intelligently is to state a vexa- 
tious truth with extreme moderation. The 
leading English critics, after years of famil- 
iarity with his acting, are still puzzled by 
it, and find a difficulty, which seems al- 
most exactly proportioned to their acute- 
ness and candor, in analyzing it and in 
accounting for its effects. And the pro- 
blem is complicated, or appears to be 
complicated, for Americans by the intro- 
duction of a peculiar factor: this is the 
necessity, immediately imposed upon us by 
Mr. Irving and his friends, of setting off 
our knowledge of his slowly won success 

[ *94 ] 





Henry Irving 



HENRY IRVING 



against any lively dissatisfaction which 
may attend our early impressions of his per- 
formance. His great success is indeed not 
to be doubted; but the amplest knowledge 
on this head will include the facts that 
even in England there are a small number 
of persons, of a high intellectual order, who 
detest and abhor his playing, and that every- 
where, in the best English society, "to 
admire him without reserve is held eccen- 
tric to the verge of affectation." As for the 
deprecation which is used by Mr. Irving's 
admirers to quench the anticipated violence 
of our first displeasure, surely the like of 
it was never before known in the case 
of an actor. " Be patient with his manner- 
isms" is the innocent and slender phrase 
employed; but this is presently found to 
bear an awful burden of meaning. We 
find that we are asked to forgive, under 
the name of mannerisms, sins which we 
have always accounted unpardonable in a 
dramatic artist. It is much, it seems at first 

C i95 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



blush, as if an amateur of painting were 
to say, "You will be delighted with M. 
Blank's pictures. He has some unpleasant 
mannerisms, to be sure, — his coloring is 
poor and his drawing incorrect* but in spite 
of these, you are sure to like his work." 
Or as if an acquaintance were to recom- 
mend for confidential clerk a young man 
who was a little weak on the score of 
honesty and accuracy, but, aside from these 
trifling mannerisms, had every desirable 
qualification. The view which a majority 
of Mr. Irving's American auditors naturally 
take, at first, of his most conspicuous faults 
is highly unfavorable. It is, indeed, the 
view which the more critical portion of 
his English audiences took when they were 
beginning to make his acquaintance. And 
the difference in the attitudes of the French 
and the English nations towards the art of 
acting cannot be better indicated than in 
this: that Mr. Irving, in spite of his faults, 
is to-day accepted and recognized as the 

[ 196 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



greatest actor of his land; while, if he had 
been a Frenchman, he and his " manner- 
isms " would not have been tolerated on 
the Parisian stage for a month, and prob- 
ably not for a single performance. 

In Mr. William Archer's exceedingly 
brilliant " study " of Mr. Irving, which was 
printed in London a few years ago, it was 
said that the English critics, " obeying 
an inevitable tendency of dramatic criti- 
cism," have " made Mr. Irving a law unto 
himself." In this country, the dangers 
attendant upon close familiarity with the 
actor do not beset us; and I plead an 
American's " innocence of eye " — to use 
Mr. Ruskin's happy phrase — in extenu- 
ation of my somewhat premature attempt 
to determine Mr. Irving's rank as an artist. 
The disadvantages of slight acquaintance 
with the actor, on the part of the general 
audience or the particular critic, are of 
course plain. But it is most interesting and 
suggestive to see how swiftly and how 

[ i97 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



completely the story of Mr. Irving's later 
career in England has been repeated in 
America. Twenty years or more of Lon- 
don have already been epitomized in a 
year of New York, Boston, and Chicago. 
We also now have a small but knowing 
faction who violently reject and refuse him, 
denying him even the name of actor; a 
large and fashionable class who are inclined 
to demonstrate their culture by taking him 
as the object of a cult; a great public who 
accept him, with all his demerits, as an 
artist of remarkable parts and powers. In 
other words, Mr. Irving has met with full 
and hearty recognition in America, and 
with a remarkable measure of success. 
And although the voice of fierce dispraise 
is not and never will be quite silenced, the 
number of conversions which have been 
made from the ranks of his early detractors 
is comically large. The "heretics," who 
used to go to scoff, already remain, as Mr. 
Archer says, "not, perhaps, to pray, but 

[ 198 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



at least to reflect and qualify their un- 
belief." 

Let us swiftly, but not carelessly, review 
the grosser blemishes of Mr. Irving's style. 
I do not find these so offensive that I can- 
not endure them for the sake of becoming 
familiar with his art, though it is an odd 
experience to subject one's self to a hard- 
ening process as the condition precedent 
of sensitiveness and insight ; but, on the 
other hand, I earnestly protest against any 
and every attitude of mind in Mr. Irving's 
auditors which shall result in their disre- 
garding or tolerating his more atrocious 
offenses. Mr. Irving, as has been suc- 
cinctly said, can " neither walk nor talk." 
Amazing paradox, — of which " the time " 
now " gives proof," — that the most suc- 
cessful and cultivated of English actors 
should not have mastered the rudiments 
of his art ! Whatever explanation or 
apology there may be, the fact remains, 
and its enormity cannot be gainsaid. He 

[ J 99 3 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 

has been on the stage the larger part of 
his life, and yet he has not learned how to 
sit, stand, or move with the ease, repose, 
vigor, and grace which are by turns or all 
together appropriate to attitude or action; 
and, worse even than this, he does not 
know how to speak his own language. He 
has many lucid intervals of elegant mo- 
tion and pure speech, — trebly exasper- 
ating as a demonstration that his faults 
are not the consequence of utter physical 
incapacity, — but he can never be quite 
trusted with his legs, his shoulders, or his 
tongue for five consecutive minutes. His 
ungracefulness is bad, but, as was just now 
implied, it is a venial fault in comparison 
with his atrocious enunciation. If there 
were such a crime as lingua-matricide, 
Mr. Irving would have suffered its ex- 
treme penalty long ago; for night after 
night he has done foul murder upon his 
mother- tongue. Soon after his arrival in 
New York, Mr. Irving was reported to 

[ 200 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



have said that he hoped the Americans 
would not be intolerant towards any Eng- 
lish mannerisms of his speech which might 
offend their unaccustomed ears. If he said 
this, and said it seriously, the remark may- 
be taken as a curious proof of his uncon- 
sciousness of the peculiarities of his de- 
livery. For his oddities of utterance are 
no more English than they are Choctaw ; 
sometimes they suggest Cornwall, some- 
times Devonshire, occasionally northern 
Vermont. But such hints are given by fits 
and starts ; the dialect is always substan- 
tially his own, an Irving patois^ developed 
oot of his own throat and brain through 
the operation of the familiar law of the 
survival of the unflttest. An alternate 
swallowing and double-edging of conso- 
nants, a frequent lapse into an impure nasal 
quality, an exclusion of nearly all chest 
tones, the misdelivery of the vowels by 
improper prolongation or equally improper 
abbreviation, an astonishing habit of con- 

[ 201 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



founding and confusing different vowel 
sounds, are the most marked of his disa- 
greeable peculiarities. The great broad 
vowels are the ones which fare the worst 
in Mr. Irving's mouth, and the reform of 
his delivery must therefore be regarded as 
hopeless ; an actor of middle age whose 
chief pronunciations of " face " are faaace 
and feaace, and of " no " are nao and 
nawo, is past praying for in this regard. 
Yet it is a part, and an important part, of 
the duty of the stage to be a pronouncing 
dictionary of the language, to bear aloft 
the standard of correct and elegant spec % , 
and to make a constant appeal to the fz/iy 
lie ear in behalf of pure and refined er i- 
ciation. This function of the stage is one 
which the unmitigated partisans of Mr. 
Irving regard with supremely contemptu- 
ous indifference. Indeed, they go much 
further, and, with more or less careless 
expressions of regret at his mannerisms, 
speak of his faults in this kind as super- 

[ 202 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



ficial and unessential ; of elocution as a 
matter of form, and not of substance. And 
they constantly inquire whether the spirit 
within the artist is not of more importance 
than the character of the tool with which 
he works. The inquiry is pertinent, the 
correct answer obvious, the figure em- 
ployed a good one. An actor is like a 
painter, and the soul of the limner is of 
much more consequence than the shape 
of his implements. But if the artist has 
only a boot-brush and a palette-knife to 
work with, his soul will find great diffi- 
culty in giving expression to its inspira- 
tions. Mr. Irving's acting often reminds 
me of the work of such a painter. It is 
a perpetual annoyance to see how ill his 
hand and tongue subserve his purposes; 
how the poorness of his tools is shown in 
dull or ugly lines ; in other words, how 
his absurd enunciation disables and dis- 
credits his thought. It is necessary to go 
even further. Mr. Irving's elocution Isr 

[ 203 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



bad in other and perhaps more important 
ways than those already indicated : his 
voice possesses very little resonance, and 
almost no richness of tone ; it is high- 
pitched and has a narrow range; he seems 
absolutely incapable of sustained power 
and variety in speech, and the inevitable 
consequence is that his declamation, es- 
pecially of long passages, is exceptionally 
weak and ineffectual. The trouble with the 
artist here lies in the want of something 
more important than a delicate brush; 
he has no proper assortment of colors to 
choose from, — little more, indeed, than 
plain black and white, — and Mr. Irving's 
work under these conditions, when he aims 
at very strong effects, seems like the 
attempt of a painter in monochrome to 
reproduce the complicated beauty of a 
sublime scene in nature. 

That the most conspicuous English- 
speaking actor of the day should be thus 
poorly equipped for his work may well be 

[ 204 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



the subject of wonder to every thought- 
ful person. A scrutinizing glance at the 
man will furnish some new matter for 
wonder, but will also afford the beginning 
of an explanation of his remarkable hold 
upon the public. The tall, slender, flat- 
chested figure ; the high forehead defined 
at its base by strongly marked and ex- 
ceedingly flexible eyebrows ; the large, 
positive nose ; the narrow, sensitive lips ; 
the long, thin jaw ; the large, deep-set, 
darkly-luminous eyes, belong to a most 
striking and impressi ye personality. Speak- 
ing for myself, I should say that Mr. Ir- 
ving's face is without exception the most 
fascinating I have seen upon the stage. 
Once beheld, it will not out of the mem- 
ory ; and I find, upon sifting my recol- 
lections, that, when there is no deliberate 
effort of my will, his face appears to me, 
not under the distorting or glorifying trans- 
formations of the stage, but with its usual 
look of quiet and somewhat sad thought- 

[ 2 °5 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



fulness. It is a countenance obviously not 
adapted for all parts, perhaps not appro- 
priate for many ; but wherever it is seen 
it immediately constrains and inflexibly 
retains the attention of the spectator. There 
is no impropriety in saying that this pecul- 
iar charm seems to grow out of the nature 
of the man himself, — out of a rare and 
lofty refinement, a subtile and delicate in- 
tellectuality, a largeness and sweetness of 
nature. The quality of refinement, indeed, 
makes itself felt in everything which Mr. 
Irving does or says; strongly appealing, 
I have observed, even to persons of no 
special cultivation • marking the tone of 
his ordinary speech, whether the sound be 
agreeable to the ear or otherwise; never 
forsaking his delivery when his enunciation 
is most uncouth ; and clinging like a faint 
odor, in spite of all the artist's fumigating 
processes, to such repulsive impersonations 
as his Dubosc and his Louis. For the 
purposes of the dramatic art, Mr. Irving' s 

[ 206 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



face is found to be singularly well adapted, 
within the limits which will presently be 
shown, to the indication of fear, disgust, 
suspicion, malice, envy, superstition, and 
hatred, and to be incomparably well fitted 
for the expression of dignity, reserve, and 
melancholy. It is capable of gentle but 
not poignant pathos, of a certain sort of 
unmirthful intellectual mirth, and scarcely 
at all of heroic scorn, wrath, frenzy, de- 
spair, or exaltation. Mr. Irving uses ges- 
ture sparingly, — a fault, if it be a fault 
at all, which is near akin to a virtue, — 
and not in such a way as to contribute to 
the vivacity or significance of his text ; 
a statement which at once demands quali- 
fication in favor of some half dozen bits 
of brilliant or beautiful illustrative ges- 
ture which I can recall, and nearly all of 
which are divided between Hamlet and 
Shylock. In the art of fencing, if one 
may judge by the duel of Hamlet with 
Laertes, Mr. Irving is a master ; and the 

[ 207 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



evidence given in that scene of the docil- 
ity of the actor's muscles as the result of 
his training is to be added to the mass of 
inconsistent testimony which makes Mr. 
Irving the least comprehensible of actors 
in respect to his professional equipment. 

The prime distinctions of Mr. Irving's 
acting and the chief sources of its effective- 
ness and charm are its intensity, its artis- 
tic propriety, and its intellectuality; all 
these being, of course, derived or reflected 
from the artist's mind. By intensity I mean 
here that quality which results from the 
actor's capacity of delivering himself and 
all his forces and faculties, without reser- 
vation, to the demands of the character 
which he assumes. The sum of Mr. Ir- 
ving's powers is much less than that of 
many other great players, but I have never 
seen an actor whose absorption in his work 
was so nearly complete and unintermitted 
as his. He never trifles, never forgets 
himself, never wearies, never relaxes the 

[ 208 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



grip which he at once takes upon his part. 
It may be Hamlet or Mathias, Charles I. 
or Louis XL, Lesurques or Dubosc : from 
the moment of Mr. Irving's first appear- 
ance he gives up to its service " the execu- 
tion of his wit, hands, heart." That this 
intensity is accompanied by indications of 
self-consciousness in the actor, and that 
every such indication impairs the worth of 
his work, is true; but the injury in this 
kind is much less than any one, upon a 
merely theoretic consideration of Mr. Ir- 
ving's art, would believe to be possible. 
His absolute sincerity of purpose is indeed 
the burdock which heals most of the 
wounds made by the nettle of self-con- 
sciousness. The dramatic consequence of 
such a high intensity is obviously great, 
but the value of the quality in holding the 
attention of audiences is inestimable. The 
spectator soon discovers that it will not do 
to skip any part of the performance; that 
if he leaves Mr. Irving out of sight or out 

[ 2 °9 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



of mind for a single second he may lose 
some highly significant look or action. 
The impersonation of Mathias, in The 
Bells, best illustrates this, perhaps, although 
any one of his assumptions would serve 
almost equally well. There are but two 
prominent ideas in the part of Mathias: 
remorse for the commission of a murder, 
fear of detection and punishment. Through 
Mr. Irving's utter self -surrender, these 
thoughts are present in every moment of 
his effort, each portion of which bears the 
same relation to the whole that a drop 
of water bears to a bucketful. Or, rather, 
the spirit of the character may be said to 
pervade the representation as the soul, 
according to certain metaphysicians, per- 
vades the body, "being all in the whole 
and all in every part." So that it is not 
extravagant to say that the nervous appre- 
hension of an undetected criminal is to be 
seen in every look, movement, and tone of 
Mr. Irving's Mathias, from his entrance 

[ 2I ° ] 



HENRY IRVING 



on the stage to the last instant of his death 
agony; appearing as obviously to the view 
when he tenderly embraces his daughter 
as when, in talk, he nervously courses 
around his secret, or turns into a statue of 
anguish and terror at the imagined sound 
of the memory-haunting bells. 

Mr. Irving's artistic sense is exceedingly 
just and delicate, and is an ever-present 
factor in his performance. In witnessing 
eight of his impersonations, I never saw it 
fail him, except occasionally in a presen- 
tation of Doricourt, in The Belle's Strat- 
agem, which was given at the close of a 
very fatiguing engagement. This faculty 
in Mr. Irving is pictorial, — nothing about 
him or his art being in any sense statu- 
esque, — and makes him, with the help of 
his intensity, the most entirely picturesque 
actor of our time. Mademoiselle Bernhardt 
has a gift of like nature, but not equally 
high in quality or large in measure. In all 
his assumptions there is an abundance of 

[ «i ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



delicate shading, of careful adjustment and 
contrast, of nice relation between parts; 
no touch is made so much for its own sake 
as for its contribution to the general effect; 
and though the inability to use grand and 
immediately effective strokes marks one 
of Mr. Irving's peculiar limitations, the 
difference, in this respect, between his 
work and most of the popular perform- 
ance, with its vulgar and violent sacrifice 
of the truth and beauty of nature to the 
frenzy for making points, is very striking, 
and altogether in his favor. In his finest 
efforts his skill in this kind is masterly, 
and fills the appreciative spectator with 
the liveliest pleasure. Among these, Louis 
XI. stands easily first, and Dubosc, of The 
Lyons Mail, is second, with no long inter- 
val. A more thorough and complete em- 
bodiment of wickedness than the former 
impersonation — of cunning, cruelty, sen- 
suality, treachery, cowardice, and envy, 
each vice being subordinate to a passionate 

[ 212 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



superstition, which it feeds, and by which, 
again, it is fed — can hardly be conceived. 
Every utterance of the strident, nasal voice, 
with its snaps and snarls, its incisive tones 
of hatred, its hard notes of jealousy, its 
cold accents of suspicion, its brief touches 
of slimy sweetness when a saint is to be 
propitiated by devotion, or a foe is to 
be destroyed by flattery; every movement 
of the false, sneering, lustful lips; every 
attitude of the feeble frame, which in the 
midst of its decrepit ugliness has instants 
of regal dignity; every one of the count- 
less expressions of the eyes and eyebrows, 
with their wonderful power of questioning, 
qualifying, searching, doubting, insinuat- 
ing, and denying, — of all these and many 
more details in this marvelous picture, 
each one is absolutely true to life; each 
one has its own place and significance, 
and its own precise relation to the general 
effect; none is exaggerated or unduly in- 
trusive. A finer, truer, and more artistic 

[ 2I 3 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



adaptation of means to ends than this has 
not been seen upon the stage within our 
time. Dubosc is as depraved a character 
as Louis: but in the robber of the Lyons 
mail-coach reckless courage replaces ti- 
midity; violence alone does the work 
which the king divides between it and 
chicane, and the element of superstition 
is wanting. The professional thief and 
murderer is of course less varied and in- 
teresting than the kingly member of his 
guild. But Mr. Irving's portraiture of the 
former is of comparatively less dramatic 
worth for that reason, and no other. His 
Dubosc is perfect in its kind, and the con- 
trasts between it and Louis serve to ex- 
emplify not only the keen discrimination 
of the actor, but the fine propriety and 
thoroughness of his artistic sense. The 
theme is low, but there is a high and legit- 
imate aesthetic pleasure in the contempla- 
tion of such a creature as Dubosc, when 
face, carriage, speech, and action, the very 

[ 2I 4 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



movement of the hands in the division of 
booty, the kick and sprawl of the legs in 
the recklessness of drunken joy, are vivid 
tints in a picture of magnificently com- 
plete ruffianism. The personation of the 
king, in Mr. Wills's tragedy of Charles 
I., also offers many fine illustrations of the 
same artistic quality in Mr. Irving, and I 
regret that I have no more space than will 
suffice for a mention of its melancholy 
beauty, its refinement, and the exquisite 
gentleness of manner which waits upon its 
regality of soul. 

But the principal source of Mr. Irving's 
professional power and success lies in the 
character and quality of his intellect. Many 
of our native players, both of tragedy and 
comedy, are persons of decided mental 
force; but Mr. Irving appears to me to 
demonstrate by his performances his right 
to the first place in the scale of pure in- 
telligence, among all the actors of every 
nationality whom I have seen, Mr. Edwin 

[ 215 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



Booth and Madame Ristori holding the po- 
sitions next in honor. It is an old axiom 
of the dramatic art that temperament is 
of the first, second, and third conse- 
quence in the actor. Mr. Irving does not 
shake my faith in this truth, but I admit 
that his career goes far to show that, in 
exceptional cases, the intellect may suc- 
cessfully take upon itself a considerable 
part of the burden which is usually borne 
by other portions of the artistic nature. It 
makes, of course, the greatest difference 
what kind of a mind is in question, for 
much more than mere mental strength 
will be required. Mr. Irving's intelligence 
seems to be of remarkable power, breadth, 
subtilty, and keenness; it is morally sup- 
plemented by a fine patience and devoted 
persistence ; it includes a genuine inventive 
faculty; it is enriched by careful cultiva- 
tion. The highest dramatic temperaments 
conceive and represent character through 
the exercise of a reproductive and creative 

[ 216 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



faculty which is like the poet's. Similar 
results may be reached through the de- 
liberate, cumulative work of the mind, 
which first analyzes the character, and 
then, piece by piece, fabricates an imita- 
tion; and the mental gifts required for such 
a process of analysis and simulation are 
of a rare and varied sort. That there is 
an immense delight in encountering such 
an intelligence as this upon the stage, no 
one will deny. Its noblest and loftiest ex- 
ercise must inevitably be had in the pre- 
sentation of Shakespeare; and here Mr. 
Irving's work becomes, in every matter 
where pure intellect and refined scholar- 
ship can avail, a subject for the profound- 
est satisfaction. His skill in arranging 
the scenes and in cutting the dialogue is 
admirably good, and his reverent regard 
for the accepted text is scarcely less 
excellent than his brilliant ingenuity in 
varying the text of doubtful passages. In 
playing Hamlet, his mental power and 

C 217 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



learning have their highest exemplification. 
No character in Shakespeare, with the 
possible exceptions of King John and King 
Lear, asks, " in the true performing of it," 
such variety, penetration, subtilty, and 
sensitiveness of mind as the accomplished 
Prince of Denmark. Simply to understand 
his plainer speech is much, for Hamlet's 
meaning does not often lie near the sur- 
face. But to follow all the twists and turns 
of his swift-pacing wit, even before it 
shows the disorder of real or pretended 
disease; to feel, as the condition precedent 
of reproducing them, the contrasting glow 
and gloom of his wondrous imagination; 
to justify his incoherence by exhibiting the 
missing links of thought which his indiffer- 
ence or ecstasy so often drops; to display 
the deep affectionateness which the keener 
intuition discovers under all his masks; to 
show the superfine sanity which constantly 
characterizes his wildest utterances, and 
yet to indicate his dangerous nearness to 

[ 218 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



that madness with which " great wit ever 
is allied; " and finally, to exhibit a charac- 
ter that, in spite of all the contradictions 
with which the master-poet has chosen to 
fill it, shall yet be human, lovable, and 
reasonably comprehensible, — these are 
tasks which require the most searching, 
refined, and patient intelligence; and by 
their accomplishment Mr. Irving proves 
his mental quality beyond dispute, and his 
ability to grapple with any dramatic dif- 
ficulty which a well-furnished brain can 
overcome. The artist's intelligence, in this 
impersonation, constantly shines with elec- 
tric clearness, and it seems to me that 
there is scarcely a sentence which does not 
receive a new illumination from his action 
or utterance. Even soliloquies, which of 
course suffer under his poor elocution, 
are thought out so lucidly and given with 
such care — though always as if the actor 
were thinking aloud, and not " speaking a 
piece " — that they often disclose new 

[ 219 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



beauties and new meanings. Exquisite 
taste, as well as acumen, constantly appears 
in an unerring sense of the relation of each 
speech to every other, to every personage 
and the whole play, and in the subordina- 
tion of his own part, when, as in the first 
long scene with the Ghost, a temporary 
effacement of himself is due to the artistic 
needs of the situation. The melancholy of 
the Prince is of a sort which Mr. Irving is 
singularly well fitted to reproduce, through 
the cast of his countenance, the quality of 
his voice in its low tones, and the bent 
of his temperament; and with Hamlet's 
habits of introspection and metaphysical 
speculation the actor's sympathy is most 
intimate and profound. 

It must be remembered, as a practical 
qualification of all which has been said of 
Mr. Irving's intensity, artistic perception, 
and mental force, that these noble qualities 
are sorely let and hindered, in their opera- 
tion upon the stage, by the faults of style 

[ 220 



HENRY IRVING 



and method to which I have called atten- 
tion, except only in the performance of 
parts like Louis and Dubosc, where his ec- 
centricities are as often helpful as hurtful. 
Yet I have meant it to appear that Mr. 
Irving, in spite of his faults, is, in my 
opinion, the most purely intellectual, the 
most picturesque, and perhaps, on the 
whole, the most interesting of modern 
English-speaking actors. The adjective 
"interesting" gives the cue for a plain 
statement of his peculiar limitations. I 
have never seen a performer that aspired 
to the name of tragedian who was so de- 
ficient as he in the higher emotional force 
and in sustained passionate power. Except 
in his gift of dealing with the supernatural, 
— by which, in Mathias, he makes a tre- 
mendous attack upon the nerves, and in 
Hamlet finely affects the imagination, — 
he is an extraordinarily light actor in so 
far as he appeals to the feelings. Many a 
poor player, who is immeasurably below 

[ 221 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



him in refinement, taste, and learning, is 
his superior in this respect. The want from 
which the difficulty grows is deep-seated, 
and is, I am convinced, nothing else than 
a lack of that temperamental solidity and 
force out of which alone the actor's most 
potent lightning can be forged. It is not 
necessary for the purposes of passion that 
this force should be accompanied with 
what Mr. Irving's idolaters sneeringly de- 
nominate " robustiousness." The sinew 
and muscle — the brawn, if you please — 
of which I speak is in the will and heart 
and imagination, not in the arms and legs. 
If one seeks it in its grandest form to- 
day, it is to be found in Signor Salvini, 
who in intellect is but little inferior to Mr. 
Irving, and in artistic faculty is decidedly 
above him ; but it filled the genius of the 
pigmy Edmund Kean, and it is abundant 
in our own slender Mr. Booth. It lies at 
the root of the ability both to conceive and 
to express the greatest human emotions ; 

[ 222 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



it is the source of the pure, pathetic faculty; 
it is essential to a complete mastery of the 
spectator; it gives the eagle's tireless wing 
to the actor's impassioned speech. I have 
already alluded to Mr. Irving's inability, 
through lack of elocutionary variety and 
strength, either to attain or to sustain the 
effects of noble declamation ; but his entire 
performance displays, through an unbroken 
series of phenomena, the want of that tem- 
peramental impetus of which his feeble 
speech and his monotonous repetition of 
the rhythmic nod of the head, the dull 
stamp of the foot, and the queer clutch of 
the breast in exacting passages are but 
single symptoms. Mr. Irving's style has in 
no respect the sustained quality ; it is, so 
to speak, altogether staccato; there are no 
sweeps or long strokes in it, but every- 
thing is accomplished by a series of light, 
disconnected touches or dabs, the total ef- 
fect of which, when the subject is not too 
lofty, is agreeable and harmonious. As for 



[ 22 3 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



his loftier-reaching passion, it has the flight, 
not of the storm-defying eagle, but of the 
short-winged, often-resting domestic fowl. 
Mr. Irving' s selection of parts for perform- 
ance in America affords a pretty sure in- 
dication of his consciousness of his limita- 
tions. But every one of the impersonations 
which he has given here furnishes evi- 
dence, directly and indirectly, of the truth 
of my thesis. The appeal which he makes 
is generally to the intellect or the artistic 
sense; he goes higher only when he must, 
and then he almost always fails. Louis 
and Dubosc are " character parts," and are 
natural and proper subjects for picturesque 
treatment. But Mr. Irving does not at- 
tempt to make anything more of them, and 
their malevolent wickedness, which an 
actor of emotional genius might use to fill 
the spectator with loathing and abhorrence, 
is a purely aesthetic delight to the most 
sensitive observer of his interpretation. 
Charles I. is an exquisite portrait, painted 

[ 224 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



with beautiful softness and tenderness of 
tints, and is mildly touching in its melan- 
choly dignity ; but its opportunities for 
poignant pathos are neglected, or frittered 
away. In Shylock Mr. Irving makes his 
most conspicuous failure in this kind. 
There are some very strong points in his 
impersonation, and the outlines of the char- 
acter are drawn with a firm and skillful 
hand ; but the stress of the Jew's great pas- 
sion is scarcely hinted at, except through 
the grim reserve of the latter half of the 
trial scene, and the explosions of his vol- 
canic nature are accompanied by nothing 
more than a little rattle and steam. Mr. 
Irving's Hamlet is not far from being an 
exception to the rule which has been laid 
down; but upon close scrutiny, I think it 
will not be found to weaken the force of 
what I have urged. It shows, indeed, the 
highest reach and amplest scope of the 
actor's intelligence ; but I venture to differ 
from Mr. Archer, the critic, by asserting 

[ 225 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 

that Hamlet is not essentially heroic, and, 
on the contrary, is a "character part." 
That Hamlet is eminently picturesque is 
obvious; that he is not a character of sus- 
tained passion is equally obvious, inasmuch 
as infirmity of will is his chief moral trait. 
At all events, it is certain that Mr. Irving 
follows the lighter method in his imper- 
sonation, and that his success in it is won 
chiefly through the variety, vivacity, and 
delicacy with which he represents the pic- 
turesque side of the Prince's nature. Upon 
a review of Mr. Irving's efforts, it will 
even be seen, not only that he has no 
capacity for displaying vigorous, sustained 
passion, but that he never attains a lofty, 
emotional pitch, even for a moment. In all 
his performances, I can recall but one in- 
stance to the contrary, and that, as all my 
readers know, occurs just before the close 
of the " play scene " in Hamlet, where his 
snaky wriggle towards the King, his scream 
of triumph and wrath, and his frenzied but 

[ 226 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



regal action in mounting the throne and 
holding it, as if he had just dispossessed 
a usurper, always produce a strong thrill 
in the audience. The instance, however, 
is isolated, and it is curious to note that 
Mr. Irving accomplishes all the best of the 
effect of the scene without the help of any 
comprehensible speech. If further proof 
were wanting of the lightness of Mr. Ir- 
ving's emotional gift, it might be found in 
the uniform demeanor of his audiences; 
those of America repeating, according to 
my experience, the behavior of those of 
London, who, if Mr. Archer's keen eye- 
sight is to be trusted, are almost always 
"intellectually interested, but not emo- 
tionally excited." That Mr. Irving ever 
attempted Macbeth and Othello seems im- 
possible; that he should ever presume to 
attempt King Lear is incredible. 

My conclusions, then, are these: that 
Mr. Irving's art would be much more ef- 
fectual than it is if "to do" were one half 

[ 227 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



" as easy " with him as his knowledge of 
" what were good to do " is clear; that if 
abundance, brilliancy, clearness and refine- 
ment of thought, artistic insight, definite- 
ness of purpose, sincerity of feeling, and 
intensity of devotion were all that is 
needed in a player, he would be easily first 
among the actors of our time; that, since 
the highest end of acting is not to refresh 
and stimulate the mind, to refine and 
gratify the taste, or to charm the fancy, 
but strongly to move the spirit and pro- 
foundly to stir the heart, his claim to a 
place among the greatest masters of his 
craft is not as yet made out. After all is 
said, I find there is a certain charm in his 
performance which has not been accounted 
for, which defies analysis, and refuses even 
to be described, but which is strangely 
potent upon the imagination of the spec- 
tator. That his existence in the dramatic 
profession, even as he is, with all his im- 
perfections on his head, is an inestimable 

[ 228 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



boon to the stage of England and America 
seems to me quite clear, inasmuch as it is 
impossible that his peculiar faults should 
find many imitators. And, looking at Mr. 
Irving, the most advanced English student 
of the drama may find one obvious com- 
pensation for the absence of a conservatory 
like that of Paris, and of a theatre like the 
Francais: for in the destruction of his 
mannerisms, which must have made a part 
of Mr. Irving's pupilage, the artist himself 
would surely have perished, as the hero- 
ine of Hawthorne's most fanciful story 
died under the process of obliterating the 
birthmark from her cheek. To Mr. Ir- 
ving's marvelous skill in setting and adorn- 
ing his stage, and in guiding his supporting 
performers, — a skill which seems to 
amount almost to genius, — I can make 
only this brief allusion. Our public are 
not likely to forget that they owe to him 
representations of Shakespeare which have 
done more to educate the community, and 

[ 22 9 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



have given, on the whole, more complete 
satisfaction and refined pleasure, than any 
others which the American stage has ever 
known. 



The criticism which precedes this para- 
graph was printed in the Atlantic Monthly 
of March, 1884, a few months after Mr. 
Irving's first appearances in this country. 
Since that time he has had several seasons 
in America, and our theatre-attenders and 
critics have had many opportunities to 
consider and reconsider the quality of his 
art. Rereading my essay, I have decided 
to reprint it with no substantial change, 
inasmuch as I find that no substantial 
change of my opinions has taken place ad 
interim, though my general summing-up 
would now be less favorable to Mr. Irving 
than then it was. In the class of actors 
worthy to be entitled " great," I know of no 
other player than he whose appeal is effec- 

[ 230 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



tual with the spectator almost wholly 
through the sense of the picturesque, or 
through what a writer of the eighteenth 
century would denominate the softer sen- 
sibilities. Neither in the view nor the 
retrospect does his acting make the blood 
jump, deeply stir the heart, or produce any 
of the higher emotions: one remembers 
him principally as a crisper of the nerves 
and a pleaser or tingler of the retina. 

The more important characters added to 
Mr. Irving's repertory in this country since 
he first played here are Dr. Primrose in 
Mr. Wills's dramatic version of The Vicar 
of Wakefield; Mephistopheles in Goethe's 
Faust, reconstructed for the modern Brit- 
ish market; Robespierre in Sardou's melo- 
dramatic tragedy of that name; and Mac- 
beth. The writer manifestly underrated 
the artist's courage, inasmuch as Mr. 
Irving did perform both King Lear and 
Macbeth in England, and made the latter 
character the prime feature of a recent 

C 2 3* ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



American engagement. None of these as- 
sumptions showed Mr. Irving in any new- 
lights. His Dr. Primrose was suave, be- 
nignant, and winning, the combination of 
simplicity, rusticity, nobility, and essential 
refinement of Goldsmith's creation being 
beautifully reproduced. Mephistopheles 
was intellectually interesting and spectac- 
ularly effective. Robespierre was chiefly 
valuable because of the shrewd skill with 
which the softer side of the terrible patriot 
was contrasted with his hard cruelty. 

Mr. Irving's Macbeth, which was first 
shown in America during the season of 
1895-96, was what might have been ex- 
pected in every particular of its strength 
and its weakness. It was admirably self- 
consistent, and at its highest moments was 
briefly pathetic or fantastically impressive. 
The Scottish soldier, assassin, and usurper 
was presented as a subtle, crafty hypocrite, 
introverted, superstitious, sneakish, void of 
moral scruple, almost wanting in physical 

[ 2 Z 2 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



courage. Nearly all the greatest commen- 
tators have agreed that Macbeth, after the 
murder of Duncan, grows steadily and 
rapidly harder and tougher, always strong 
in imaginative vision intellectually, but less 
and less capable even of high or unselfish 
conceptions, his whole nature sustaining 
hideous induration and decadence. But 
Mr. Irving in the first two acts so slurred 
the better elements in Macbeth's character 
that there was no possible interest to be 
taken in the struggle between the powers 
of good and evil in his soul; and, after 
his great crime, he appeared not different 
in substance from what he was before, or, 
rather, by a strange perversion and inver- 
sion of the scheme of the text, he was 
shown not as firmer, but softer, of fibre, 
more and more hysterical and spasmodic, 
more inordinate in grimace and snarl, a 
creature not much unlike the Louis XL 
whom Mr. Irving has given us. In short, 
the heroic element, the potency of physique 

[ 2 33 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



and will, the solid force of nature, which 
might be exhibited without suppressing 
Macbeth' s vivacity, nervousness, and ima- 
ginative sensitiveness, suffered a total 
eclipse. 

Such a scheme of the character may be 
defended on one line of reasoning and sup- 
ported by citations here and there from 
the text of the tragedy. But an unpre- 
judiced critic will surmise that the causa 
causans of what must be pronounced an 
inadequate and un-Shakespearean concep- 
tion is in the operation of the actor's sub- 
consciousness of limitations which dis- 
qualify him for the portrayal of the part 
on a more robust plan. Precedents and 
parallels are common of like mental pro- 
cesses in other actors and, indeed, in 
artists in all the arts. There is seldom any 
insincerity in such cases: the " sub " which 
modifies the consciousness clears the theo- 
rist of the charge of untruthfulness; he is 
really not aware that his knowledge of his 

[ 2 34 ] 



HENRY IRVING 



own powers is the chief factor of his aes- 
thetic judgments. 

Mr. Irving' s delivery of the text of Mac- 
beth was often inadequate. The greatest 
passages were generally the greatest suf- 
ferers. The vast potencies of such lines as 
the incomparable five which begin, — 

" What hands are here ! ha ! they pluck out mine 
eyes," 

were melted into commonplace under his 
tongue. On the other hand, the meaner 
side of the part was frequently made very 
vivid; and some sombre descriptive lines 
such as 

" Ere the bat hath flown 
His cloister'd flight, ere to black Hecate's summons 
The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums 
Hath rung night's yawning peal," 

and 

" Light thickens ; and the crow 
Makes wing to the rooky wood : 
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse ; 
Whiles night's black agents to their preys do rouse," 



[ 235 ] 



A DRAMATIC CRITIC 



were so delivered as darkly to haunt the 
secret places of the memory as some som- 
bre winged things haunt the recesses of 
caves. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Actors, training of, 68-75; 
segregation of, 103 - 105 ; 
general isolation, 106-109; 
peculiarities of, 109- 1 11; 
disappearance of tragic, 133; 
would profit by Endowed 
Theatre, 188 ; American tem- 
perament suited to, 188, 189. 

Advertiser, Boston Daily, 4, 21. 

Archer, William, 197, 225. 

Barnard, Charles, 190. 

Barrett, Mrs., 52. 

Barron, Charles, 52. 

Barry, Mrs. Thomas, 34, 49. 

Beauvallet, M. Leon, 57, 58. 

Belasco, Mr., 190. 

Betsy Baker, 15. 

Blanchard, Miss Kitty, 34. 

Booth, Edwin, 48,131-133, 143, 
216 ; progress and variety, 
133, 134 ; distinction in elo- 
cution, 133; his Shylock, 135 ; 
his Richelieu, 135 ; his Iago, 
I 35> J 36 ; his King Lear, 
136-138; his Hamlet, 139- 
141 ; his limitations, 138. 

Boston, naive passion for the 
theatre, 31 ; home and work- 
shop of Wm. Warren, 53 ; 
its Theatre Francais in Wm. 
Warren, 56 ; accepts Fech- 
ter's Hamlet, 117 ; indiscrimi- 
nating and greedy, 190-192. 

Boston Museum, 7, 9, 50-53,58. 

Boston Theatre, 50, 113, 132, 
142. 

Box and Cox, 15, 16. 

Buckstone, J. B., 15. 



Carson, Miss, 34. 

Cary, Miss Mary, 34, 49. 

Caste, Robertson's, 38, 42. 

Chanfrau, Mrs. F. S., 34-36. 

Children of Cyprus, The, 9. 

Children, Dramas for, 7-9. 

Clapp, Henry Austin, 3-5, 27- 
30. 

Clarke, Miss Annie, 52. 

Comer, Tom, 51. 

Criticism, dramatic, should be 
free and clean, 23; power 
and impotence of, 24 ; great- 
er public uninfluenced by, 

2 5- 

Critics, dramatic, 22 ; ideal, 22 ,' 
generally honorable, 23 ; per- 
sons non grata, 31, 32. 

Curtis, Mrs. D. S., 36, 37. 

Cushman, Charlotte, 47, 82 ; as 
Meg Merrilies, 83, 84; as 
Lady Macbeth, 84-86 ; as 
Queen Katharine, 86-92. 

Daly, H. F., 34. 
Davenport, Mrs. E. L., 34. 
David Garrick, Robertson's, 

37, 38. 

Davies, J., 52. 

Dora, Charles Reade's, 34-36. 

Drama, ephemeral, 39-42 ; Ro- 
bertsonian, 42-45 ; law of sur- 
vival of, 44, 45; American, 
48, 189^ 190. 

Drunkard, The, 9. 

Dunbar, Charles F., 4. 

Elaine, George P. Lathrop's, 
183. 



[ 2 39 ] 



INDEX 



Enchanted Beauty, The, 9. 
Enchanted Horse, The, 9. 

Farces, Old Time, vogue and 
sources, 13; merits.and faults, 
14, 15; theory of, 14; great 
actors in, 15; authors of, 1 5, 
16; best examples of, 13, 15, 
16. 

Fechter, Charles, 47; career as 
an actor, 113-117; appear- 
ance and equipment, 117- 
120; in Hamlet, 116, 117, 
120, 121 ; in Ruy Bias, 121- 
123; in The Lady of Lyons, 
123-125; as a lover, 124; 
limitations of, 125, 126; mis- 
take as to a text of Hamlet, 
126, 127 ; decadence and 
death, 128, 129. 

Fitch, Clyde, 190. 

Foregone Conclusion, A, 181, 
182. 

Forty Thieves, The, 9, 10. 

Gaszynski, Miss, 12. 
Gillette, William, 190. 
Globe Theatre, 50, 129. 
Greek Drama, 46. 
Griffiths, G. H, 34. 

Hardenbergh, F., 52. 
Harris, Miss, 34. 
Home, Robertson's, 38. 
Howard Athenaeum, 18. 
Howard, Bronson, 48, 190. 
Howells, William D., 181. 

Ici On Parle Francais, 16. 

Introduction to Reminiscences, 
1-4. 

Irving, Henry, 194-197 ; career 
in America, 198 ; peculiari- 
ties and mannerisms, 198- 
203 ; his personality, 204- 
207; his intensity, 208-211 ; 
his artistic sense, 212-215; 
his intellectuality, 215-219; 



his Mathias, 210, 211 ; his 
Louis XL, 212-214 > his Du- 
bosc, 212, 214, 215^ his 
Charles L, 215, 224, 225 ; his 
Shylock, 225 ; his Hamlet, 
217-220, 225-227 ; his deal- 
ing with the supernatural, 
221; his limitations, 221-225; 
critical estimate of, 227-229; 
his Dr. Primrose, 231, 232; 
his Mephistopheles,23i, 232; 
his Robespierre, 231, 232; his 
Macbeth, 232-236. 

James, Louis, 179, 180. 
Janauschek, Madame, 48, 180, 

181. 
Jefferson, Joseph, 13, 48, 64. 
Josephs, Harry, 34. 

Keach, Mr., 52, 58. 
Kemble, Mrs., 177, 178. 

Lathrop, George P., 183. 
Leclercq, Miss Carlotta, 47, 

127, 128. 
Le Moyne, W. J., 34, 49. 
Little Em'ly, Dickens's, 48, 49. 

Mathews, Charles James, 47, 
77, 79-81. 

Morant, Miss Fanny, 28, 34. 

Morris Bros., Pell & Trow- 
bridge, 17. 

Morton, John Madison, 15. 

Murdock, H. S., 34. 

Negro Minstrelsy, 17. 

Neilson, Adelaide, 48 ; her ca- 
reer as an actress, 1 59-161; 
her progress as an artist, 161, 
162, 169 ; her Juliet, 163, 
164 ; her Rosalind, 164, 165 ; 
her Imogen, 165-167 ; her 
personality, 167, 168 ; her Vi- 
ola, 170-172 ; plastic beauty 
of, 168, 169; relation with 
the Ideal, 171, 172. 



[ 240 ] 



INDEX 



Nilsson, Christine, 47, 173-175. 

Ours, Robertson's, 35, 43, 44. 

Partridge, William Ordway, 

176, 177. 
Piamonti, Signora, 155-158. 
Pearson, H., 34, 49. 
Phillipps, Adelaide, 10. 
Poor Pillicoddy, 16. 

Quinquennium, Great Dra- 
matic, 47. 

Raymond, John T., 49. 
Reignolds, Miss Kate, 52. 
Ristori, Madame, 216. 
Robertson, T. W., 35, 37-39, 

42-46. 
Robinson, Frederic, 34, 35, 49. 
Robson, Stuart, 34. 
Rolfe, Dr. Wm. J., 5. 
Russell, Miss Annie, 183, 184. 

Salvini, Alexander, 181, 182. 

Salvini, Tommaso, 47, 142 ; his 
personality and equipment, 
143-145 ; his Othello, 145- 
147; his Samson, 147-150; 
his Sullivan, 150; his Ingo- 
mar, 150; his Conrad, 151- 
155 ; his King Lear, 151 ; his 
Ghost in Hamlet, 151. 

School, Robertson's, 45, 46. 

Scribe, Augustin Eugene, 13. 

Secret Service, William Gil- 
lette's, 190. 

Selwyn's Theatre, 33-37, 49. 

Siddons, Mrs. Scott, 29, 30. 

Smith, W. H., 51. 

Smith, J. A., 52. 

Sothern, E. A., Sr., 48, 93-103. 

Spirit of '76, 36, 37. 



Terry, Miss Ellen, 156. 
Thaxter, Levi, 175, 176. 
Theatre, The Privately En- 
dowed, 185-193. 
Thoman, Mrs., 51. 
Thomas, Mr., 190. 
Toodles, 16. 
Took, J. L., 76-79. 
Training for the Stage, 68-75. 
Tree, Beerbohm, 178. 

Uncle Tom's Cabin, 10-12. 

Vandenhoff, C. H., 34. 
Variety and Vaudeville, 18, 19. 
Viennese Children, The, 7. 
Vincent, Mrs., 12, 52. 

Wallack, James W., 128. 

Warren, William : in the Forty 
Thieves, 10 ; in Uncle Tom's 
Cabin, 11 ; in Farces, 15; in 
Adrienne the Actress, 58 ; 
in The School for Scandal, 
62; career as an actor, 53, 
54 ; number and variety of 
parts played, 54, 55, 61 ; va- 
ried and remarkable skill, 
55, 56, 59-61 ; praise of, from 
M. Beauvallet, 57, 58 ; com- 
pared with Joseph Jefferson, 
54, 62-64; personal appear- 
ance and manners, 65-67 ; 
blood and parentage, 69; 
training for the stage, 68-70. 

Wells, Miss, 34. 

Whitman, Frank, 11, 12. 

Wilkins, Mrs., 34. 

Williams, T. J., 15, 16. 

Wills, W. G., 215, 231. 

Winslow, Mrs. Erving, 52. 

Winter, Mr. William, 117. 

Woods, George B., 4. 



[ 241 ] 



Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton &* Co. 
Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A. 



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